A converted school has given the artist Stephen McKenna the perfect place to work, writes Gemma Tipton.
One of the most difficult things for an artist to know is when a work is finished. It's the same with any creative project. You start with an idea in your mind, but the journey from that point to the finished piece is full of unexpected changes, deviations, revisions, problems to solve, questions to answer. And often the result is, if not extremely far from what you had envisaged, at least somewhat sideways to it. The artist Stephen McKenna works, he says, "by instinct", and his test of whether a painting is finished is to bring it into his home, a converted convent school in Bagenalstown, in Co Carlow, where he will live with it for a while. Here, the warm dusty light and colours of southern European cities, and the shades of skies, rivers, shorelines and bridges, are tested against the cool grey of the kitchen wall, or next to the neutral tones of the double-height inside studio - practically a gallery in itself - upstairs.
You don't always know, he says, if a painting is right for a year or more after it is completed. McKenna works on several at a time in the studio he has built to the rear of the former convent. "Then, when I think one is done, I bring it into the kitchen. There's the over-the-fireplace test, and if it works there for a while I move it upstairs, to the second studio, or into the bedroom. If I can look at it every evening and every morning for a few weeks, without something irritating me, then I know it is done.
"Decisions in painting are made by instinct," he continues. "But those instincts are learned and refined by the experience of working. Of course you cannot entirely control what goes into a painting. Things happen which you did not expect, even things which you do not know about. But you must be able to recognise what has happened on the canvas, to control what comes out of the painting."
The results are paintings that are uniquely his, rather than photographic representations of a particular place. "I do not work from photographs," he says. "Although recently I have used them to check what I think I saw. When working on the Porto paintings I felt that I needed more information. When I returned there for a few days I was almost convinced that the scene had changed, because it did not correspond with the reality which I had painted."
Back in the cool grey and dark wood kitchen in Carlow, the current occupant above McKenna's stone mantelpiece is one of the Porto paintings. The contrast is between the heat he has captured in the scene and the calm quiet of the large kitchen. The original house dates from about 1750, and even though it has been added to and extended over the years, there are only five rooms. All are, however, beautifully proportioned. "They really knew what they were doing at that time," says McKenna. The house contains paintings and drawings by Eithne Jordan, Elizabeth Magill, Nathalie du Pasquier, Peter Schermuly, Juan Navarro, Chung Eun Mo and James Lee Byars, among others. There are also photographs by Amelia Stein and Maria Gilissen.
McKenna discovered the house following a decision to stop wandering Europe. "For many years I had divided my time between Ireland and somewhere on the Continent - Ireland and Germany, Ireland and Belgium, Ireland and Italy." Although he had a house and studio in Co Donegal, he was looking for a more permanent base, at first exploring the options in Dublin.
But he soon "realised it was too late to afford anything I would want to live in", so he went farther afield. McKenna spotted the convent in the window of an estate agency in Carlow town, and he immediately thought: "That's what I need. The building was important - it faces north, the ideal direction for a studio - but so was the countryside here: the River Barrow, the undulating landscape, Mount Leinster."
A certain amount of remedial work needed to be done. The floors and ceilings were intact, but McKenna had to rewire, replaster, replumb and put in new window frames. Unlike many former schools, this one had generous windows, positioned to provide views. When McKenna first visited, they had been covered with opaque paper, so that the children couldn't see out. The furniture he found and assembled from auctions, although, as he points out, "a lot of it is the sort of thing you would have found in an institution like this anyway".
McKenna spent time on the project, to let it evolve. "Had I known the full extent of the restoration and re-building to be done, I might not have started," he says. He began the renovation with an architectural firm, "but when I saw that they had included a drain running uphill on the plans, I decided to do it without them". Instead he concentrated on getting a feeling for the house, for how it worked. "With an old house no room is square, no wall is vertical," he says, adding that it was also important to get things right visually. "We put an opening in from the kitchen to what was going to be the conservatory but is now the room of my dog Bran, and it wasn't centred. I knew I was going to have to look at it every day forever, so I had it changed, just six inches to the left."
Bran, a five-and-a-half-year-old wolfhound, also figures in McKenna's work, although, McKenna says, he hasn't finished any of the "real" portraits of him. Painting animals can be a tricky business, we agree. McKenna talks about a recent painting of a donkey; "Caoimhin Mac Giolla Léith [the art critic] saw that one and said: 'Yes, it looks like a donkey - the kind with a man for the back legs and a man for the front.' I changed it, hopefully for the better. But painting animals is difficult, in some ways more so than the human figure. Perhaps the greatest painter of animals was George Stubbs, but then he was one of the greatest of painters anyway."
McKenna's perhaps unfashionable admiration of Stubbs points to a crucial element of his work: the avoidance of the fashionable movements and trends that seem to dominate contemporary art. "Success in the art world is a peculiar thing," he says. "Any painter who says that he does not enjoy praise, recognition and respect is a liar, but anyone who believes that it is of more than passing significance is a fool. If one concentrates on those matters which one believes to be important, maintains one's own position, then fashion will come and go." The accuracy of this is borne out by McKenna's nomination, in 1986, for the Turner Prize and by his consistently successful career.
As I drink a glass of wine in McKenna's kitchen, the thought crosses my mind that I don't really want to leave, so perfect is the place he has created. The light changes as time passes, Bran gets up, sighs and lies down again, and we talk about painting, schools, nuns, foreign cities, horses and, then, painting again. "I have always tried to be rational," says McKenna, "in the way I work and the way I see things. There is quite enough unreason in the world and in oneself for there to be any need to indulge in it as an artist." Rational it all may be, but his paintings are still enough to transport you and make your mind take its own journey of discovery and wonder.
Stephen McKenna's exhibition Contrasts and Complementaries ends at the Kerlin Gallery, Dublin 2, today. See www.kerlin.ie