The fields that are named in Hughie O'Donoghue's Rubicon Gallery exhibition, Naming the Fields, are those around his grandmother's home in Erris in Co Mayo, the house where his mother and her sisters were born. The names refer to the story of the land and are a part of local history, preserved orally, remembered by his aunt, but marked on no official map that he could find. His paintings are an imaginative bid to explore the personal and public meanings of this lost, remote terrain, and in a way to reconstitute the emblematic presence of some of the individuals who once inhabited it.
The ambiguous human forms who inhabit the rivers and the landscapes in the paintings are simultaneously ghostly and corporeal. Figures arc and flex and contort themselves with the flow of current or the weight of the land. They have an intractable physicality, as in the monumental back in Muingingaun (Maiden Stream), but they also blend with and merge into their surroundings; pale bodies fading to black peaty water, to red earths and fiery skies.
The pictures, with their weathered, burnished surfaces, have a brooding intensity, a meditative quietness.
For O'Donoghue, this work is "a way of opening up a territory. I use the term field as a metaphor for ideas of abandonment, of ghosts, of a lost connectedness to place, of memory. It has to do with my sense of who I am as communicated to me by my mother, and evoked by experience of a place which has a hold over my identity in a curiously separated way, intangible but definite. You know, everybody comes back to measure themselves against some ground."
He was born and brought up in Manchester. His mother had moved there from Ireland in 1937. "All the sisters went, one by one." Yet, like the exile in Tarkovsky's film Nostalgia, his mother's identity remained firmly rooted in her homeland, even though the homeland she had left was a harsh place, a remote, desolate corner of Co Mayo. In many ways an unforgiving, relatively unpeopled landscape. It is, as O'Donoghue describes it, "a real wasteland, not beautiful in the way we conventionally think of beauty". Yet he found that, if anything, the very bleakness, the loneliness, accentuated its profound, melancholy hold.
It wasn't particularly melancholy when he went there every year with her as a child, on holiday. "It was incredibly elemental to someone coming from urban Manchester. It was full of kids, and anarchy reigned. When we were there, the only constraints were the real dangers - of drowning, for example. And there was a haunted house that we approached with dread."
Where O'Donoghue's prior work dealt with his father's wartime experiences, Naming the Fields is about his mother's world. "My mother was a kind of silent partner in the earlier work," as he puts it. "There was a misinterpretation of that work, an assumption that it grew out of a bonded fondness between myself and my father - in fact, it was the opposite. In a way, I made the work to try to make sense of the complexity of the relationship."
The cover image on the catalogue, a photograph of his grandmother in a field of haystacks, was taken by his father. She could be a peasant woman anywhere in Europe, a woman who has had a tough life and is fairly tough herself, which was broadly the case.
"She raised eight children on a poor patch of land. The world she inhabited seemed completely solid and permanent, its enduring values were spelled out in the catechism. But it has all disappeared. When my mother died \in 1976\, it wasn't just that she was gone, it was as if a whole house of cards had collapsed overnight."
O'Donoghue is instinctively a tonal painter, drawn to a sombre range of dark earth colours, but in this body of work he has tried consciously to deal with colour. If the earlier paintings looked to Rembrandt's tonal strengths, now he is learning from Titian's late paintings, which combine colour with tonal richness. Going through his photographs of Erris, he realised that they are mostly in black and white.
"But the colour there is intense, the vegetation, the sand, the constant, momentary changes of light - you cannot record them, they're all fleeting." His preoccupation with the past has nothing to do with nostalgia. "History is a mirror. When you look at pictures of your parents, you always ask, what of me is in that image? I'm adamant in my belief that meaning is not something that can be put into painting. All I can do is to make a picture as well as I can. It will be some time before I can get any kind of distance and see what exactly is going on. It can take years to filter through. People tend to rush to find over-obvious connections between artworks and their causes. Whereas really you don't quite control this. Pictures cannot be understood intellectually - they have to be experienced in terms of feeling."
Since moving to Ireland five or so years ago, he has been exceptionally productive. He didn't particularly plan it that way, but seems happy enough about it. His enthusiasm and engagement are, if anything, greater than ever. "I don't know where the desire to make paintings comes from, but it has to do with a fascination and love of the medium - I still have it after 30 years." His painting are always strongly grounded in a sense of the elements. "Water, earth, fire, I keep going back to these things. It has to do with a direct connectedness to the world rather than with abstract ideas."
A painting has to be more than the sum of its parts, though. "It has to record things in a different way to other forms of documentation. The subjectivity of painting has been perceived as a problematic area in painting - you know, there's a vogue for casting things, rather than drawing them, because casting is guaranteed to be true to the source as opposed to drawing, which introduces an interpretative dimension. But the interpretative dimension, the subjectivity of drawing and painting, is what interests me. It isn't science, it's painting, it's a distinct voice."
Naming the Fields by Hughie O'Donoghue is at the Rubicon Gallery until November 24th
Hughie O'Donoghue will introduce and talk about his work in Naming the Fields at a special Irish Times event in the Rubicon Gallery in November. See next Saturday's Weekend for details.