Visual Arts: Reviewed today are sea by Merlin James, the The Sun Propeller by Michael Boran and Kevin Kavanagh and paintings by Miriam McConnon and Ruth McDonnell.
sea Merlin James, Kerlin Gallery until Nov 12 (01-6709093):
The Sun Propeller Michael Boran, Kevin Kavanagh until Oct 29 (01-8740064):
Miriam McConnon, Ruth McDonnell, paintings, Lemonstreet Gallery until Nov 10 (01-6710244)
Recently, in relation his own work at the RHA Gallagher Gallery, Stephen McKenna drew a distinction between sea painting and maritime painting. Maritime paintings usually feature ships, boats and have to do with the culture of seafaring, as exemplified in the paintings of Cork Harbour shown earlier this year in Cork Custom House. Over centuries, generations of maritime artists documented the history and evolution of the harbour and the port, providing engrossing accounts of developments in shipping, building, trade and recreation.
Sea painting largely dispenses with the trappings of traffic and concentrates on the elemental confrontation between human subject and vast ocean. By this definition, the great German Romantic Casper David Friedrich painted many works featuring boats and ships but overwhelmingly tended toward McKenna's category of sea rather than maritime paintings - his The Monk by the Sea being a case in point. Equally, Courbet's stormy, tempestuous The Wave, features boats at sea but is a sea picture and positions us, as viewers, low on the shoreline directly in the face of breaking waves.
Perhaps Merlin James's Green Sea, in his exhibition sea at the Kerlin Gallery, is partly a nod to Courbet. It's like The Wave redone in calmer weather, and in a calmer painterly idiom. In place of Courbet's explosive bursts of water driven by tumbling cloud masses, a series of waves breaks in orderly rows under a cloudy, moonlit sky. There is a sense of the hypnotic rhythm of the sea, and a terrific liveliness to the broken light.
In the press release, James is quoted as remarking that the genesis of his series of sea paintings may well have been his experience of walking on beaches: Coney Island, the Clyde Estuary, Sandymount, the Bristol Channel. He also notes that most of the artists who interest him, including Courbet and Jack B Yeats, have painted the sea. This dual engagement comes through in his work. On the one hand the response to specific times and places, on the other the awareness of the art historical context - and he is always the most historically aware of artists.
It is as if his project here is to consider a thematic concern which has been addressed by numerous artists. So much, in fact, that it is to some extent problematic, in the way that Paul Henry's evocation of the West of Ireland became hackneyed and debased through simplification and repetition. Friedrich's Romantic accounts of figures by the shore descend, in lesser hands, into easy sentimentality and kitsch, and the ocean, in formulaic landscapes, is an ocean of cliche.
Yet James is not a painter who rehearses outworn artistic styles. There is a considered, analytical distance in his work, but not an ironic detachment. He is a self-conscious painter, and he self-consciously employs a range of painterly techniques in the sea pictures. As with McKenna, often his paintings have a schematic character. In Green Sea, it is as if he is dealing not just with the appearance of the waves but also trying to convey something of the fluid mechanics involved.
James tries to steer a path through these things - through historical knowingness, the risk of lapsing into cliche, the artifice of painting technique - without losing sight of that walk on the beach, the link with real experience and painting's ability to deal with it: ". . . you gaze a few waves out from the shore, and you're in the universal Sea." It's a big subject, and a quietly rewarding show.
Michael Boran's The Sun Propeller takes a high angle viewpoint of the urban traffic of people going about their business. In his sequence of large-scale colour photographic prints, he ranges a bit further afield (as with the oddly biblical The Burning Tree), but mostly his work is dominated by a view of a public space, typically a paved square, as a kind of chess board on which people play out ritualised pieces of social life. He is attentive to texture, and his compositions, partly by virtue of his unorthodox viewpoints, are intriguing, usually taking us by surprise.
Miriam McConnon and Ruth McDonnell share the Lemonstreet Gallery. Both show paintings. McConnon's, inspired by an archaeological site, are muted, moody studies in which sharp-angled, blocky forms slot together. Lengths of what might be thread are incorporated in the paint surface. While the pictures are atmospheric, they are not quite atmospheric enough to convey the layers of time and history she seems to be aiming for, lacking as they do a feeling of painterly substance.
McDonnell refers to the border landscape as a means of evoking "ideas of real and imaginary boundaries and frontiers". It's a rationale that doesn't particularly come across in her work, which nevertheless has an engaging, lively, spontaneity to it, suggesting a willingness to take chances and let the paint lead the way. She is drawn time and again to a particularly rewarding motif: a cluster of birch trunks against a watery, vegetated background.
There are several convincing variations of this basic pattern. The vertical accents of the trees against the oblong of a pool make up a satisfying compositional armature on which she develops spirited arrangements of colour and texture.
