Green Light Wanes .. . Recent paintings by Elizabeth Magill Kerlin Gallery, Anne's Lane, South Anne St, Dublin 2. Until December 23
IT’S EASY to like Elizabeth Magill’s paintings in
Green Light Wanes
, her new exhibition at the Kerlin Gallery. If you are familiar with her work over the past decade or so, you will know roughly what to expect: German romanticism revisited in beautifully made images based on landscapes, shot through with a sweetly melancholic mood and a certain ironic distance. There’s more, of course, but that’s a consistent thread that binds it all together.
The irony stems from something that has been evident in her art from the beginning, her scepticism about the very idea of representational language, of the imposition of order on chaos.
Time and again her paintings show her fascination with the ambiguous status of the brush stroke or any other kind of mark or material that can be pressed into service to make a recognisable image.
This isn’t some subtle undercurrent apparent only to the initiated. She emphasises the duality of the blob of pigment that is blatantly just a daub of colour but also, our eyes quickly trick us into believing, a rather beautiful blossom. Or, in the past, the particles of party glitter that were transformed into stars in the sky through the magic of art.
Lest such devices become nothing more than tricks of the illusionist’s trade, she also pushes things further, applying chance smears, scrapes, splashes and stains, challenging herself to incorporate them into something that simultaneously works as a coherent image yet undercuts the very notion of a coherent image.
Magill was born in Ontario, Canada, in 1959. She was raised in Co Antrim and studied there initially. After attending Belfast College of Art she went on to the Slade School of Fine Art in London, where she has been based for many years.
An artist of considerable conventional abilities, she was also very ambitious and energetic in terms of the scale and concerns of what she did. Two features of her early work stand out: its fluent, virtuosic realism and its repeated use of the same motifs. It seems fair to conclude that she instinctively distrusted both her own facility and representation in general.
In late 1989 and into early 1990 Magill reached a high point with a body of work made for an exhibition that was shown in the Kerlin, at the Köln Art Fair and then in the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol. (One of those paintings is in Irish Museum of Modern Art’s collection.)
It looked outstanding at the time and in retrospect it was one of the truly noteworthy solo exhibitions by an Irish artist of the past 25 years. In the work she explored with great wit, inventiveness and skill the whole idea of painting as a representational language, considered in relation to other symbolic ways of ordering, interpreting and understanding the world.
The Arnolfini show, well-received and important as it was, did not win her the level of acceptance and acclaim she deserved in London.
True, she has been consistently successful since then in London and elsewhere. She is highly regarded in the art world among critics, institutions and collectors, but she is easily as good as, to put it politely, many better-known artists who first made a big splash at the time.
Strangely enough, immediately after that notably less substantial bodies of work she created based on airport X-ray images of luggage and pop song lyrics should have been more accessible but didn’t seem to clinch the deal either.
Perhaps Magill was never cut out to be a celebrity in style of the Young British Artists. As it has developed, there is something essentially introspective and quiet about her work.
About 10 years ago she began to make paintings that among other things draw parallels between the mythologising of the American west and the west of Ireland. That concern with the way landscapes are infused with personal and cultural meaning is still evident in her current exhibition.
The new paintings are small, and their plain, square-cut frames are painted so that they become part of the picture, in the manner of Howard Hodgkin’s work. They don’t describe a consistent terrain, but phantasmagoric woodland spaces dominate, the kind of fantasy realms we find in the paintings of George Russell (AE).
MAGILL ISN’T A MYSTIC in the AE mould, but she’s not averse to a bit of magic and tinsel, and the Celtic twilight comes strongly to mind given the wistful, elegiac nature of her layered images.
Several symbolic presences and motifs occupy the landscapes including a white horse, a laden mule with a fairytale ballerina on its back, a structure that looks suspiciously like a house of cards, a rainbow and a flying carpet. Poet and political activist Roger Casement features in two tenderly affectionate paintings. In these he is given the opportunity to look back and reflect, an opportunity never accorded him in life.
Writer James Joyce's alter ego Stephen Dedalus also appears as a ghostly figure, and a passage from Ulyssesprovides the show's title, which seems to refer to our own, current Celtic twilight: "A skeleton judashand strangles the light. The green light wanes to mauve."
The Gaelic Revival looked forward as well as backwards, and Magill’s paintings with their heady, unstoppable inventiveness, their delight in creative possibility and imaginative potential, are nothing if not optimistic.
They suggest unfinished business, an Ireland that might have been, and might still be.
