Donald Teskey's paintings have a flowing, rhythmic quality - never more so than in his latest work, writes Aidan Dunne, Art Critic
In person, artist Donald Teskey is mild and reticent. Asked a question, even a simple, everyday question, he will pause, sigh, raise his eyebrows and eventually, hesitantly, proffer a terse, cautious reply, often preceded by "Well, I suppose . . ." or "I guess . . ." It's not that he sets out to be unduly tight-lipped. The answers do come in time, and they are likely to be thoughtful and considered.
But he is someone who takes nothing for granted, who regards things quizzically, almost suspiciously, as a matter of course.
Regards and quizzically are doubly appropriate terms, because he is an inveterate observer, someone whose eyes are constantly at work. In his bright, airy studio in Kimmage in Dublin, his eyes flick restlessly and critically across the surfaces of his own paintings. This has nothing to do with vanity. It is only under relentless visual interrogation that pictures reveal their errors and insufficiencies. Teskey's views on his own work evolve all the time. He likes to keep pieces around until he is absolutely sure.
At one end of the studio, besides quite an orderly work table and a small store of books, there are two substantial speakers, a stereo and shelves of records and CDs. He listens to music - he doesn't broadcast his preferences but he is a jazz fan - as he works, and much of the music he listens to is on vinyl. He also works a great deal. Usually, he says, he is really keen to get into the studio and reluctant to leave it. He doesn't boast about this, or indeed anything else. In fact he refers to it in a self-deprecating way, laughing at himself and remarking: "I obviously need to get a life."
Painting and drawing are physical activities to a significant degree. His absorption in long spells of work with musical accompaniment may partly explain the flowing, rhythmic quality of what he makes. Certainly, rhythmic energy is a characteristic of pretty much everything he has done as an artist, and never more so than in the group of very large paintings that make up the heart of Tidal Narratives, which opens next week in Limerick. These big paintings are all variations on one spare theme: the collision of water and land, sea and rock.
They derive from two locations - the coastlines of north Mayo west of Ballycastle and of west Kerry at Ballinskelligs. Although he is extremely faithful to the geology and topography of each place, he doesn't set out to make iconic representations of local landmarks. Nor is he particularly interested in huge natural drama. The explosive force of water against rock is of course dramatic, but in a routine, workaday way, part of, as his show's title indicates, an ongoing narrative rather than a once-off cataclysmic event like a fierce storm. Overall, it's as if Teskey is looking for a pictorial pattern or armature within which he can work. In conversation he refers in several ways to finding a structure that will allow the paint to flow, or to speak, or to breathe.
In this he has succeeded probably as never before with the large paintings, which are ambitious on every level. He was consciously looking for the maximum scale at which he could comfortably work. In the event, he is very much at home within the space of these huge canvases. The pigment plays very freely across their expansive surfaces, applied with gestural spontaneity. Yet the gestures never part company with the image, or with the feeling of the subject matter. The paintings never veer towards abstraction, that is to say. They remain inextricably linked to their sources in nature, to the shock of breaking waves, the thick, wet textures of rock fissured and worn down by the sea over hundreds of thousands of years. The results are enormously impressive.
IT'S PERHAPS STRANGE that a painter who is most strongly associated with paintings of the city has taken so decisively to the natural world. In fact, Teskey has shown a consistent pattern of change and development. Born in Limerick, he attended the Limerick School of Art and Design and quickly showed great flair as a draughtsman. Drawing remains a strong point. There are a couple of large-scale drawings in Tidal Narratives, and the show is complemented by Land Fall Variations at the Rubicon Gallery, Dublin. It consists exclusively of a group of substantial charcoal drawings, with dense, velvety blacks and lustrous whites, that address exactly the same subject matter.
Given his talents, it was logical that he go into illustration, and he illustrated a number of children's books, very successfully. His early drawings, that is his personal work, explored the urban environment, initially the mean streets of social deprivation in photo-realist studies of bleak, wind-blown corners of the city. Subsequently, in Dublin, he made vivid, night-time studies of the landscape around the Viaduct at Milltown. They have a heady, romantic, dramatic quality about them, and they led directly on to highly-charged figurative works that depicted family life in terms of theatrical allegory. The circus provided imagery: life as a high-wire act, overseen by the beasts of the jungle. The allegorical imagery was seamlessly interwoven with the urban setting.
SUCH EXPLICIT FIGURATION though, is rare in his output. He went on to develop highly structured accounts of the city, the city encountered as though negotiating a maze. And, surprise surprise, there were rumours that, though an established, avowed draughtsman, he was experimenting with oil paint. It wasn't hard to see how his fluent, vigorous charcoal style could translate into pigment, but in fact he didn't simply set out to do in paint what he had already done in drawing.
He started from scratch. Slow, very slow to exhibit his paintings at first, he waited until he was sure of what he was doing. What he was doing was to get accustomed to paint on its own terms. Rather than translate the linear element of drawing he devised a way of painting largely dependent on knives, so that his unit of mark-making wasn't a line but a slab, a block of pigment. This gave his work an architectonic quality suitable to the urban landscapes that inspired it and, more, a sculptural solidity to the way he defines form using the fall of light across the geometry of the of the city.
His move outwards, to the coast, came about as a result of invitations: from John Horne to visit Cape Clear Island, off west Cork, from the Ballinglen Arts Foundation in Ballycastle (to which he has returned many times), and from the Cill Riallig Artists' Retreat in Kerry. At first he painted the coastal architecture of coastal towns. But in time he gravitated towards the amorphous expanse of the sea, as experienced on a rough crossing to Cape Clear, and to the natural architecture of sea cliffs. One might have thought an artist of cautious instincts, and one slow to make claims, might have been more resistant to change. As Tidal Narratives confirms, Teskey's patience and apparently caution do not preclude change and an openness to challenge.
Tidal Narratives is at Limerick City Art Gallery, Pery Square, from Thurs, Sept 15 to Oct 30. Tel: 061-310633. www.limerickcity.ie/LCGA; Land Fall Variations is at the Rubicon Gallery, Dublin, until Oct 8. Tel: 01-6708055. www.rubicongallery.ie