Revealing a lifetime of portraits

Barrie Cooke is more renowned for his watery landscapes, but his comparatively rare portraits makes up a consistent body of work. Now, an exhibition displays them together for the first time

WHEN SIOBHAN McKENNA agreed to pose for a portrait by Barrie Cooke in 1964 she was, as he says, “something of a grande dame”, a living legend of the Irish theatre. And she behaved like a grande dame, leaving him waiting for an hour and a half or more on their first appointment. Cooke is an artist for whom painting is all about the moment, and the moment depends on the quality of the nervous energy he brings to it. When the imperious McKenna eventually arrived, he was so annoyed and discomfited that he decided to take her to task.

How would you like it, he asked her, if you were all ready to go on stage and the curtain didn’t go up for one and a half hours and no one told you why? Her face fell as she allowed what he’d said to sink in. “Is it really like that?”, she inquired doubtfully. Oh yes, he assured her, it is just like that. Then they got down to the business of painting. His admonition had some effect, but she didn’t entirely turn over a new leaf. “For the next sitting,” Cooke recalls, “she was only about five minutes late.”

You may not associate Cooke with portraits. The vast majority of his work is rooted in landscape in one way or another, usually with watery associations, from Irish lakes and rivers to the Borneo rainforest or the vast spaces of New Zealand. He's also painted many nudes, which can in a sense be described as portraits. But portraits per se are relatively rare in his output – rare, although they do form a consistent strand. Because he has only made one or two a year on average, some of them have turned up singly in his solo exhibitions, but they've never been seen collectively. There has, over the years, been some talk of showing them together and now Anna O'Sullivan of the Butler Gallery in Kilkenny has done so in Barrie Cooke: Portraits.

Cooke has tended to paint friends, and his friends include poets – because he reads a lot of poetry – together with writers, artists, singers and actors. There is a fluid immediacy to most of his portraits that is familiar from his landscape paintings. Cooke is a fisherman, and he has a hunter’s instinct. Each subject is a quarry to be caught in paint.

Ted Hughes’s craggy face is visibly composed of pigment applied and worked by Cooke’s fingers. He has drawn and painted Seamus Heaney brilliantly several times. John Montague and Dermot Healy also prompted memorable paintings. Among artists who sat for him are Dorothy Cross, in her diving gear, Nick Miller and Camille Souter with her trademark beret.

Cooke loves painting redheads. When he saw Mary Coughlan at the Baggot Inn he decided he really wanted to paint her. She wasn’t interested. So he started the painting without her, then rang her and said, “Look, you’ve got to sit for me now.” And she did.

He’s not sure that she likes the result, which is a fiery effusion of pinks and reds and is not particularly flattering, though it does convey the singer’s rapt absorption in performance. He feels Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, another redhead, wasn’t that taken with his portrait of her, either. By comparison with the Coughlan, it is a study in serene self-containment. Both paintings capture fleeting expressions with precision.

Temperamentally, Cooke is a fast worker but, as he notes, you never know. Often you can tell the paintings that worked out well quickly from those that took much longer by the sheer build-up of paint. Not invariably, but most of the time, thin and fluid means fast; more fixed and substantial modelling means slow. His study of John McGahern is a case in point. He assured McGahern that he’d wrap it up in a day and he was confident he would. But it just didn’t work out.

“I had to drag John back about 20 times and I still wasn’t happy with it.” Eventually, Cooke went away and, when he returned to the studio, he looked at the painting and finished it there on the spot. “I rang John and told him I’d managed to complete it. He said ‘Great, and what’s even better is that I wasn’t there, thank God!’”

The two most recent works are of Leland Bardwell and Tess Gallagher. The latter returned the compliment by composing a terrific poem about being painted by Cooke that includes a deft portrait of him as an artist at work:

“For me you will be simply landscape,”

he says, coaxing me to abandon hope of

influencing what will be done with me . . .

Now he is squinting like a man with his nose

in a tourniquet and dancing backwards

from the one appearing next to me . . .

As for me, I’ll take away

Barrie dancing.

Barrie Cooke: Portraitsis at the Butler Gallery, The Castle, Kilkenny, until April 26. Open daily 10am-1pm, 2pm-5pm. 056-7761106