Cheshire-born Barrie Cooke paints nudes, landscapes and - controversially -polluted water, which reflects his huge concern for the environment, he tells Aidan Dunne.
Barrie Cooke is 75 this year, and his current exhibition, at the Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, marks the occasion with spirited treatments of several of his favourite themes: the New Zealand landscape, water and rocks, the female nude and, last but not least, polluted water. Paintings of the latter have given even habitual collectors pause for thought. Cooke recalls that one, having belatedly discovered the subject of a painting - sewage fungus - after purchase, immediately brought it back. To his recollection, there is only one private collector who has enthusiastically bought a pollution painting. "Apart from that, they've tended to go to institutional collections."
In a way that is surprising because, despite their grim subject matter, his pollution paintings are, on the whole, rather beautiful. "That's the paradox," he explains. "I'm painting what's there. The collector Vincent Ferguson said to me once that the one problem he had with them was that they were too beautiful for what they were about. But sewage fungus, and blue-green algae - these things are rather beautiful even though the consequences are dire. I'm not going to make an ugly painting just to convey the right sort of message." A consistent cornerstone of his art has been his fidelity to the facts of what is there in front of him.
There is a popular view, he said once, that fishermen are calm, patient souls. An ardent, lifelong fisherman himself, he can attest that: "In fact they are the most impatient people you can meet. People imagine that you are content to sit there for hours waiting for something to happen, but you're not, you're in a frenzy of anticipation." He fits the bill himself and can only be reluctantly persuaded to sit still for any length of time. In conversation, he is given to jumping up and pacing briskly to and fro. His sheer zest for life comes through even in a casual encounter with him.
One feels that he does not like to be pinned down. Apart from being a keen traveller (to places such as Borneo and some of the more rugged parts of the US, Mexico and Cuba), he has lived most of his life in rural or semi-rural environments, close to water, and he often seems most at home outdoors. Born in Cheshire, he spent his teens in the Bahamas, moved on to the US and then came to Ireland while on a visit to explore his origins in England. Here he liked the moist climate, the unspoilt countryside and the fishing.
From his arrival in Ireland in the mid-1950s he lived first in rural Co Clare, then close to Thomastown in Co Kilkenny. Now he is based east of Lough Arrow in Co Sligo, with stunning views across the lake to the Bricklieve Mountains, backed by the Moytirra plateau, a place rich in archaeological and mythological associations - it is the scene of two important battles for the Tuatha De Danann. He keeps a boat on the lake, but he has long been a fierce critic of the insidious progress of pollution through Ireland's waterways, and Lough Arrow has, sadly, proved to be no exception.
"Louth Arrow was one of the first places I came to when I arrived in Ireland, so I've fished it for 50 years. Up to 10 years ago, during the mayfly season there were 200 boats on the water. Last year, there were six, and they were owned by a few local people like me who were going out more in hope than expectation." It is, he says, an exceptional body of water, fed by springs, with no river outlet, the only place he knows of where the trout swam downstream to spawn.
THE SITUATION IS currently complicated by the advent of the zebra mussel, an extraordinarily prolific freshwater species that has worked its way up the Shannon. "It feeds on blue-green algae, so that it's basically vacuumed up the algae that clogged the water. Superficially, the water looks good because it's clear, but the thing is that no one knows what happens now, what effect the mussels will have now they've exhausted the algae, apart from the fact that they breed so much that they tend to block up water pipes."
One can see why pollution has been such a significant concern in his work for many years, and not at all in a vague, generalised way. Furthermore, he is aware of the complexities of conservation issues. "There's no doubt in my mind that agriculture or, more accurately, agribusiness as it is now, is responsible for eutrophication. Examples of pollution from factories are rare and readily identifiable." But he is not anti-farmer. "I'm surrounded by farmers and I know that they have a very tough life." A culture in which over-fertilisation is standard practice is to blame. For wholesale destruction of the countryside, he has no hesitation in assigning responsibility to developers. "I regard them as the worst villains in the whole world."
From late in the 1980s, he has visited New Zealand for long periods practically every year. He was drawn there, as he is to most places he visits, for the fishing. In the event it became an extraordinarily rich source of inspiration for his painting.He found two worlds: the dry, sun-drenched east and the wet, afforested west. Both have given rise to distinct series of paintings. When he initially explored the country, he was convinced that he had found somewhere exempt from the depredations of pollution but, to his horror, that has changed.
The Didymo paintings in his current show are works he thought he would never make: works describing polluted water in New Zealand. "They're flummoxed by it because no one is quite sure what it is or what the cause is, but it's now spread to, I think, five rivers."
His own view is that changes in agricultural practice are at the heart of the emergent problem. "Farming on an industrial scale has to have repercussions. There's a switch from sheep farming, which is relatively low impact, to dairy, which has much greater consequences. There's also the related issue of water extraction." He used to think that the fact that New Zealand is such an enthusiastically outdoor nation would help preserve the environment. "I've never seen more sporting goods shops anywhere. Nearly everyone gets out there and walks, treks, swims, fishes, hunts, whatever. I thought that would be the saving of the place. But the pressures of development are becoming apparent. People tend to shrug their shoulders and say: 'Well, that's progress'. But of course it's not progress."
True to form, the Didymo paintings are beautiful, partly because no one can paint water quite like Cooke. He can achieve things that are magical in the way the overall images transcend the marks that constitute them. This has to do with his working method. Although he tends to work on paintings over long periods of time, the end results have a remarkably fresh, spontaneous look. He paints in oil, but treats it as though it were watercolour, in thin glazes, laying on great flowing washes of paint with sinuous, rhythmic energy. Not that he is averse to building up pigment if texture is called for, but he is fundamentally a painter of flow. This applies equally to his nudes, in which the physical substance of paint doesn't, as say in Lucien Freud, embody the human presence, but rather flows over and hence describes a presence that is somehow, palpably there. The nudes are always eroticised, not salaciously, but inasmuch as painting is, for him, always about desire in some sense.
HIS LIFE IS notable for his singleminded devotion to his work which can, from the outside, look selfish. He has long accepted that as part of the deal, acknowledging that it can be hard on other people, and particularly those close to him. He has three daughters, two with Harriet Cooke and one with Sonja Landweer. There are several marriages behind him. And there is, in his case, an additional aspect, which is fishing. In a way, painting and fishing havetended to blur into one and, while he may not put it that way himself, his fidelity extends to both.
Although he reads a great deal, and will argue passionately and cogently about the things he cares most about - including painting, poetry, writing generally and conservation issues - he is adamant that he is not an intellectual artist. Wary of art theory, he favours instinct, emotion and, most important, empathy. His work is distinguished by a kind of electrical charge, one that comes from brushing against something alive and imparting something of that aliveness. He has built friendships with several poets, including Seamus Heaney, the late Ted Hughes and John Montague. He has painted superb portraits of them, and many others, including Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, the singer Nora Ni Ring and the late John McGahern. In fact, he reflects, McGahern's was the last portrait he painted to date. Looking back over his extensive record of exhibitions, the portraits make up a notable absence. No one has yet gathered them together and exhibited them. It's a project worth taking on, if, that is, anyone can pin Cooke down long enough to organise it.
The exhibition of Barrie Cooke paintings runs at the Kerlin Gallery, South Anne Street, Dublin, until Jun 3. Tel: 01-6709093. www.kerlin.ie