Drawn to Olympic heights by dramatic landscapes

It’s 60 years since painting featured in the Olympics, but artist Maurice Orr is among those commissioned by London 2012

EVEN IN his wildest dreams, Maurice Orr couldn’t have imagined playing any part in the Olympic Games. His slight figure is simply not made for putting the shot, high jumping or running the marathon.

However, to his utter amazement and unfettered delight, visual artist Orr has just been awarded one of the first commissions for the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad, which contains the largest arts and disability programme ever to be delivered in the UK. Orr joins prestigious names such as Candoco Dance Company and Graeae Theatre Company in creating new work for London 2012. The commission will consist of four large-scale sensory installation pieces entitled The Screaming Silence of the Wind, inspired by the dramatic scenery of his native Co Antrim.

“This is huge for me, I’m pinching myself to believe it’s true,” he says. “The whole idea is getting scarier and scarier. It will challenge me like nothing else has done, as I will be working on an unfamiliarly large scale and using unusual materials, like fish leather, which I sourced when I was on a residency in Iceland back in October. But this amazing opportunity will help to bring my work to a new level of ambition and has motivated me to reach those goals like no other.”

As Cian Smith, Northern Ireland creative programmer for the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad, explains, there will be a great deal more to these forthcoming Olympics than wall-to-wall sport.

“The ethos of the modern Olympic movement is the merging of art and sport,” he says. “It’s about championing the body and the mind. The last time that medals for the arts were presented at the Olympics was in 1948 in London. Sixty-four years on, an integral part of this massive event will again be the celebration of sporting, artistic and cultural excellence, promoting the ideals and values of the movement right across the UK, not just in London.”

Born in England in 1953 with a severe organ malfunction, Orr’s life has been marked by chronic ill-health, which he steadfastly refuses to get him down. But get him down it did, when he was hit with an acute condition that necessitated complex surgery. At the age of 41, his career as a graphic designer with the Northern Ireland Civil Service was over.

“When my working life ended, I was very depressed,” he recalls. “Those were dark days. I could see no way ahead. I felt like that for about four years, but towards the end of that time, I started painting again and it proved to be my salvation.

“Before long, I couldn’t get enough of it. I was hooked on the smell of the turps and the paints and the white spirit – and I still am. I might get clabbered, but what the hell! My wife Jane thinks I’m crackers and she’s probably right.”

Using oils and a palette knife, Orr started building up a body of paintings that captured the wild landscapes of the north Antrim and Donegal coasts. His training in 3D and graphic design was evident in their perfect composition and superb draughtsmanship. But looking back, he views that early work as “twee, chocolate boxy. I could knock one up in an hour or so. I don’t do twee any more.”

He charts his progression as a painter to the more abstract and dramatic. To the outside eye, however, even those early paintings, of which he is so dismissive, seem to contain a story, a mood, a sense of something significant that has happened or is waiting to happen.

“Well, that’s true. Without a story, a painting means nothing,” he declares. “The story is as important as the paint. When I go out to a new location, I sit for a long time and look and look and get to know it inside out. My idea of the perfect location is Dunseverick on the Antrim coast. That’s ‘my’ landscape. It has the sea, the glens, a sense of total isolation. I love the wildness of the Atlantic coasts. Really, the wilder the better.”

Then in 2002, “something big” came along. Orr put in for a bursary from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland to fund a trip to Canada.

“I just thought I’d have a go,” he says. “I didn’t think I had a hope in hell.” But the award came through and off he went. The following year, buoyed up by a sense of personal and professional achievement and haunted by raw images of the vast Canadian prairies, he decided to apply for a 10-week residency at the prestigious Banff International Centre of the Arts.

“I can honestly say that that residency changed my life,” he recalls. “I found myself in the company of some of the world’s top artists and musicians. My brief had been to paint skies and mountains in winter, but I found myself in a little studio in the woods, where all I could see was trees. So I reckoned that if that’s what was there, that’s what I was meant to paint.

“The ultimate praise came from a lady from the First Nations, who was at the opening of my exhibition. She said that I had captured the spirit of the forest in the paintings, that the souls of her people were in those trees. They have become a metaphor for my new life.”

Armed constantly with a little bag of tricks, containing the apparatus to keep him alive, Orr has resolutely pitted himself against the elements in defiance of his condition.

In 2006, he took up a residency in the small arts commune of Hill End, once a gold mining town in the Australian outback.

There he almost died after painting in the heat of the midday sun. But, he says, it was worth it, if only for the series of “sound paintings” he returned with, some echoing the “warm” ubiquitous sound of the didgeridoo, others the “cool” rustling of the cicadas.

Six months ago, he says he was blown away by Iceland, literally and artistically. From his studio base in Skagastrond, on the exposed northern tip of the country, he produced a collection of powerful, lightning-fast oil sketches of towering waves, snow streaked mountains and peaty boglands akin to favourite home landscapes.

They gave him the idea for his London 2012 project, which will combine tactile paint media with soft swathes of gorgeously dyed fish skins, which he came across on a visit to a fish factory.

But, in a rare moment of calm reflection, this garrulous, amusing man confesses that Iceland might have been a step too far for his frail constitution.

“One night, I was almost blown into the sea by a gale of 110 miles per hour. I’m lucky to have survived. I do love extremes of climate and big, bleak, isolated landscapes. But I think I may stay closer to home for a while. I have this project to work on and it has to be completed by the end of the year. That’s quite enough of an adventure to be going on with.”