For years, teaching hijacked John O'Leary's painting career, but a retrospective in Cork shows the artist he was and might have been, writes Aidan Dunne
JOHN O'Leary, who died in 1999, was well-known as both a painter and a teacher. He was also extremely active in the cultural life of the two places he lived for most of his professional life: his native Cork and, latterly, Sligo. For much of the time his own painting took second place to other demands, but there is no doubt that he more than merits the attention of the retrospective exhibition of his work that is currently running in Cork's Crawford Gallery.
One of 11 children, O'Leary was born in Cork in 1929. He left school aged 14 and worked as a barman, but he nurtured an interest in art and eventually enrolled as a student at the Crawford School. Early drawings, linocuts and watercolours suggest he responded well to his academic schooling, although his work in oils sees him slightly more adrift, looking for a painterly idiom that allows a degree of spontaneity, but not quite finding it - something that anticipates his later artistic uncertainty.
On graduating in 1957 he was awarded the Gibson Bequest scholarship to enable him to study in Paris. He was primed, keen and open to influences. It should have been the making of him. Yet it is clear from Peter Murray's meticulous biographical essay in the catalogue that his experience of Paris was far from the artistic liberation that it might have been.
For one thing, like many an Irish artist before him, he went to study with Andre Lhote. As it happened, Lhote and another artist, Albert Gleizes, were central to the restricted form of Modernism that filtered through to Ireland from quite early in the 20th century.
Lhote practised and preached an ossified, academic form of Cubism that bore little relation to the quick-witted, inventive brilliance of Picasso and Braque back in the movement's heyday. The fact is that O'Leary and his contemporaries were misdirected in going to Lhote when they did. O'Leary seems to have been instinctively aware of that.
He bridled and defected to the Academie Julian, which wasn't, alas, much better. His one bid for freedom was his enthusiasm for the work of Serge Poliakoff and Nicolas de Stael, tentatively expressed in his own painting.
On the whole, despite high points (like a friendship with the expatriate Irish painter, Patrick Collins), it sounds as if he had a fairly miserable time in France. He was desperately short of money and didn't have or make the contacts that might have galvanised his imagination. He might as well have been one of the Irish artists who made the pilgrimage back in the late 19th century, as though Modernism and all of the huge artistic upheavals of the 20th century had never happened, so tentatively do they impact on his approach.
If it didn't happen in Paris, it certainly wasn't going to in early 1960s Ireland. But, to his credit, O'Leary was an active and progressive participant in Irish cultural life.
Back in Cork, his financial circumstances prompted him to study for his Art Teachers' Certificate, to make a living by teaching part-time. It was the beginning of an unplanned career that led him, after the acrimony of an industrial dispute at the Crawford School of Art, to Sligo in 1973. There the RTC was establishing a fine art course. With Con Power, he developed the course and set up the department.
He was a generous and fondly regarded teacher. With Ronan MacEvilly, for example, he was instrumental in starting the Sligo Art Gallery, and he initiated the annual open- submission exhibition of small works, Iontas. Between teaching and other activities, and increasing ill-health, it is little wonder that his own work was relegated to the back-burner. When Patrick Collins visited Sligo in 1984, he accused him of selling out by becoming a teacher rather than a full-time painter. Collins, perhaps aware that, for all his considerable achievements, he had for various reasons not fulfilled his own potential, was famously watchful of what others were doing.
Still, the criticism stung and O'Leary did become more active and productive in the last 15 years or so of his life.
SURVEYING the representative sample of his output in the Cork show, there is a sense that O'Leary never painted his breakthrough picture, a work that marks both a decisive consolidation of everything known and a step forward. If you look through his work for such a painting, there are several that should have been potential contenders. One has to be his largest composition, The Raising of Lazarus, made on his return from France. But, clearly uneasy with the scale, and perhaps constrained by the terms of the commission, he kicks for touch and settles for an unsatisfactory, caricaturish image. It is a desperately disappointing painting.
By contrast, Spring, Lissadell, from 1988, is a very good painting, indebted to de Stael, certainly, but fully there. The landscape elements, always implicit in his work, are explicitly present. Yet it is as if O'Leary retreats from the freedoms he assumes in this painting, as if he will not let himself build on them, so that he is back into a search for a more difficult, more fraught kind of significance in String of Pearls in 1991. Without a doubt, he found it difficult to find his natural tone of voice in his work. When he self-consciously adopts a whimsical, relaxed tone, the results are forced and unconvincing. When it just happens, as with Bog Cutting, Connemara, we get a glimpse of the painter he might have been.
It often seems that he spent considerable energy going against the grain of his own talents. In Abstract Composition (6), for example, not untypically, he backs himself into a corner, worrying and embellishing the forms as if reluctant to follow the logic of the picture. It seems likely that what he was trying to achieve was a distinctive voice, which he was perpetually unsure that he had found or could find. Besides anxieties relating to the influence of Poliakoff and de Stael there was, closer to home, the presence of Tony O'Malley, who was an undoubted influence.
Photography was an important activity for him and the idea of difficulty is present in four of his photographs included in the show. Extremely good, with none of the hesitations of the paintings, they each feature a view beyond a window, heavily obscured by rain and condensation. They are about what we cannot see, or the difficulties of seeing. And they are of a piece with one of his very best paintings, the outstanding Abstract - Untitled 1 from the mid-1960s, which centres on an amorphous, pale central mass that seeps into and enlivens peripheral forms (this fine painting should be in a public collection).
But the subdued affirmation of this work is subsequently contradicted by what is in a way its pendant, another wall-like Untitled, this time from 1978, a hard, disillusioned image which unequivocally frames an absence, literally a black hole, at its centre.
This show, while welcome, is on the borderline between being a tribute and a true retrospective. One longs to see more work, and especially more photographs, to get a real sense of the artist (a slightly enlarged version of the show is scheduled for Sligo at the end of May). While it is accompanied by a good, well-documented catalogue, several illustrations are, oddly for what is not a particularly large publication, repeated. Far better to reproduce more works.
The John O'Leary Retrospective is at the Crawford Municipal Art Gallery, Cork, until May 18th (for details, tel: 021-4273377).