A civilised sense of wonder and romance

VISUAL ART: Stephen McKenna PaintingsKerlin Gallery, Anne's Lane, Sth Anne St, Dublin 2. Until Oct 9

OVER A period of several years, Stephen McKenna embarked on periodic trips to towns and cities in Europe. A few years ago, he made an exhibition of the paintings he made of three port cities: Lisbon, Naples and Porto. Now he has made another show of paintings about cities, but he has cast the net wider. The works in the Kerlin gallery include, among their locations, Dublin, Berlin, San Sebastian, Betanzos, Alcantara, Cascais and Istanbul. It’s an outstanding exhibition. Despite the geographical diversity there’s a tremendous unanimity of mood and purpose to the work.

The paintings are beautiful but McKenna isn’t after postcard views – we see a dredger at work in the Bosphorus strait for example. As with his pictures of ports, he sees the cities from a practical as well as an aesthetic point of view, in terms of “the underlying geometry of their construction . . . how crowds and water move through them.” Towns are built and rebuilt, they are simultaneously orderly and haphazard, new and old. Yet there is something optimistic, even romantic about McKenna’s vision of these centres of life and industry. As emblems of human enterprise, they emerge as heroic, civilized and admirable.

McKenna has been based in Ireland since 2000. Prior to that, from the early 1970s, he spent periods in Ireland, England, Germany, Belgium and Italy. He was born in London in 1939 and he went to the Slade School of Fine Art in London in 1959.

While there, he has said, he was a bit nonplussed by the fact that no one was actually teaching him anything in the sense that he had expected to be taught – how to draw and paint. It was more a question of, as he put it to Hilary Pyle, “catching up with the modern-art world”. But he had little or no interest in the kind of abstract painting then in vogue, or in conceptual art. He was by instinct and inclination a classicist, in his identification with the classical tradition in European painting, and in his developing interest in classical antiquity.

He’d realised this well before the end of the 1960s, specifically when he saw a big Poussin exhibition in Paris in 1967. One could profitably look to great artists such as Poussin, he realised, not as purely historical figures, but as instructive in terms of how to approach the practice of painting now. And McKenna has consistently been fascinated by the practical business of painting. He respects the material basis of the craft, a respect that ran counter to the prevailing wisdom in art education, and that partly accounts for his involvement in the RHA with its plans for re-establishing a school.

How did this latter-day classicist survive and indeed thrive in an art world that was dead set against most of what he stood for? Well, he certainly benefited from an accident of history, in the form of the unexpected and widespread resurgence of painting in the late 1970s, although he wasn’t the kind of painter the name most often given to the movement – Neo-Expressionism – suggested. He has quietly and diligently pursued his own course, as far as one can tell, uninfluenced by artistic fashion or commercial pressures.

That course has taken him on an exploration of traditional painting genres, the still life, the interior and the landscape. He has also looked to mythological subjects, often with an elegiac, reflective mood. John Hutchinson identified this underlying melancholy as “a yearning for a state of perfection that is now certainly absent and that perhaps never existed”. But then, Hutchinson observed, this was supplanted by something akin to “innocence . . . a sense of wonder that is modestly remarkable”, and somehow manages to coexist with “an air of weary knowingness”.

Technically, McKenna is a very accomplished artist, although there is sometimes a kind of awkwardness to his paintings. It surely derives from his stubborn commitment to figuring things out in paint. This isn’t to say he’s a conceptual painter (which usually means that the painting per se is something of an afterthought), rather that his thinking seems to be embodied in the act of painting and its attendant problems. The sense of wonder and innocence that Hutchinson referred to, writing in 2003, is certainly there in the more recent work.