Hector McDonnell wears an artist's smock and paints in a realistic style, but his work still engages with our times, writes Aidan Dunne
It might seem as though Hector McDonnell, whose retrospective is currently showing at the Ulster Museum in Belfast, is a wilfully anachronistic artist. A conventionally skilled draughtsman and painter of genre subjects - the stuff of daily life - he adheres to traditional representational methods. He even allows himself to be photographed, palette in hand, wearing an artist's smock in a non-ironic, non-Grayson Perry sort of way. Artists just don't do smocks any more. They do industrial workwear or jeans and close-fitting sweaters. But McDonnell is blithely indifferent to the niceties of fashion, artistic or otherwise.
Born in Belfast in 1947, he is the younger son of the Earl and Countess of Antrim. His elder brother is the current earl. His mother, Angela, née Sykes, was a sculptor trained in the academic tradition, and when it came to Hector's artistic training she set about installing him in that tradition by arranging for him to study with the sculptor-architect, Fritz Wotruba, in Vienna, after he'd attended the art academy in Munich. If McDonnell has the air of an Old Etonian about him it's probably because he is an Old Etonian. After Vienna he studied history at Oxford, but he still nurtured the ambition to be a painter and set about fulfilling it.
The earliest picture in the show dates from his teens: a tempestuous view of stormy skies at the family home, Glenarm. The next, chronologically, is a triple portrait, painted in his early 20s, at his home in Camberwell, London, and it already embodies many of his characteristic preoccupations.
That is, it inventively juxtaposes three carefully observed figures, including a self-portrait, it is acutely sensitive to nuances of light and shade, and it delights in the play of endlessly recessive and overlapping interior and exterior spaces and reflected spaces.
In fact, McDonnell's hallmark is to set up what might, on the face of it, be a straightforward image of someone doing something simple, such as drinking coffee in a café, and then, via vertiginous perspective, to lure the eye of the viewer into a labyrinthine network of spatial complications.
It's fair to say that he is best known for his pub interiors. He has painted a lot of them. He is clearly a connoisseur of fine old bars, in Belfast, Dublin, Paris, Madrid and New York, on the basis of their innate qualities, of course, but also surely for the visual possibilities they present. They usually have mirrors, for one thing, not to mention snugs and doorways into further rooms and glimpses of the world outside - all grist to McDonnell's pictorial mill.
In Camberwell in the early 1970s, fired with enthusiasm by Pop Art, he painted shop-fronts, butchers and fishmongers.These works reveal his incredible appetite for visual detail. They are like inventories, a quality that has been evident in his pictures ever since, with their zest for rendering things, from itemised retail displays to domestic objects. Looking at these paintings now he notes that: "One thing I've more or less eliminated from my work since then is the element of caricature."
Caricature was a deeply ingrained habit. His mother, he says, was a vicious caricaturist and the whole family used to have a go. It adds to the Dickensian flavour of his vision of London, but it also limits the pictures in an odd way. While he's lost the inclination to caricature, he's retained his flair for observing and vividly conveying character.
By the time he was commissioned by the Worshipful Company of Fishmongers of the City of London to paint Billingsgate Fish Market before its demise, he was painting straight. His huge Billingsgate Market, completed in 1975, is a terrific painting, a piece of 19th-century realism that really works.
It recalls the big, ambitious subject compositions by Manet or Degas, and has something of the latter's sombre tonality and precision about it. McDonnell's spatial skills ensure that we feel we are standing in the centre of a real place.
He spent a lot of time in the market in the early morning and came to love it, and to know the people who worked there, with one exception: "The man in the centre of the composition, who never engaged in conversation at all." Finally, out of good manners, McDonnell approached him to ask him if he'd like to see the finished painting in which he was a central presence. He might, he asked him, have noticed the artist working away in front of him for several months? No, actually, he hadn't noticed. Would he like to see the painting? A pause, a sigh. "Let me explain something to you, sir. I hate fish. I hate artists. And I hate Billingsgate."
McDonnell was doing well in as much as his work was in demand. Then, in 1978, he was awarded the Kunspreis of the city of Darmstadt. With it went a retrospective of his work to date. It was, surprisingly, a difficult experience.
"I couldn't work for about a year afterwards," he says. The problem was the shock of seeing his work gathered together. "I'd had notions about what my work was about, that it had to do with all these sophisticated thoughts, all sorts of calculated, conscious intentions. Now I could see all that counted for nothing."
Pictures worked or didn't work for simple, obvious reasons that had nothing to do with calculation or intent.
"In a way you're faced with the problem of how on earth you can recapture a state of something like naivety," he says.
New York, with its incredible character and vitality, its neighbourhoods and byways, went some way to providing a solution. McDonnell has returned frequently since, and strengthened his links with the city, spending much of his time close to it with his partner and their three-year old daughter. After September 11th, he was on the first plane he could get across the Atlantic, and he made paintings based on the scene as close as he could get to Ground Zero.
"It hadn't occurred to me, but the smell brought me right back to Belfast in the 1980s," he says.
He has travelled further afield as well. Offered a show in Hong Kong in 1986 he found himself with some weeks to spare out there. Someone suggested he go to Tibet, and he did. He didn't have it in mind to go back but, last year, presented with the opportunity of accompanying an expedition exploring western Tibet with Charles Allen, he jumped at the chance. He produced a significant body of work, including some fine landscapes, based on the experience.
He also made paintings in Rwanda, under the auspices of Concern. Visiting Zaire and Rwanda in 1996, he had the traumatic experience of finding himself under shellfire for two terrifying weeks before getting out in a convoy. All of which is more than enough to indicate that, while there is undeniably an anachronistic element to what he does, it is also an accurate reflection of its time. A prolific, hard-working painter, draughtsman, printmaker and writer, he is happy to work anywhere.
"As long as I can use my eyes, that's all I need," he says. "Apart from that, there are many more ideas than there are hours in the day."
Hector McDonnell: A Retrospective is at the Ulster Museum, Botanic Gardens, Belfast until March 28th, 2004 (048-90383000)