Although many have tried to root Charles Tyrrell’s art into his West Cork landscape, his abstract paintings are actually landscapes in themselves
MOST DAYS, Charles Tyrrell can be found in his studio, a plain, white- painted room with a pitched roof and an organised, businesslike air about it. It’s exclusively roof-lit. There is no window offering a view of the world outside. If there were such a window, and you looked through it, you might, weather permitting, see a chaotic, vertiginous rocky landscape rearing up from the limitless expanse of the Atlantic. It’s a breath-taking prospect.
Tyrrell lives at the tip of the Beara peninsula in West Cork. His house and studio are north of the village of Allihies, high up a tiny, winding road on Eagle Hill. It’s an isolated place, though there are neighbours to share the isolation. At times, perched on Eagle Hill, you can seem to have cast off completely from the earth, and be floating above a sea of mist. The whole area, including Cod’s Head, Dursey Island, the ocean and the Miskish Mountains back to the east (once mined for copper), is quite spectacular.
A perfect setting you might think for a landscape painter, and it is. But Tyrrell isn’t a landscape- painter. Still, as Patrick Murphy writes in his introduction to the Tyrrell’s current exhibition at the Solstice Arts Centre: “For nearly 30 years now, critics have from time to time sought, without success, to root Tyrrell’s abstraction into his West Cork landscape.”
You can see why.
Firstly, surely a visual artist wouldn’t spend decades living in a remote, stunning location and yet remain professionally immune to it. Secondly, at several points throughout Tyrrell’s career, one can discern references to landscape in terms of the titles of his works, his palette and the atmospheric tonality of his paintings. Thirdly, he’s made a significant body of graphic work reflecting the geological character of another striking location, the Ballinglen Arts Foundation in Ballycastle on the north Mayo coast, where he has spent some time.
Yet he is an abstract artist.
As he said himself, rather than depicting something, like say the landscape, he is: “travelling towards an image that has its own reality”. He takes a few simple, arbitrary rules, usually based on dividing a square geometrically, and then applies them to the painting process. This leads him to a finished painting, but he doesn’t know what it’s going to look like when he starts. He’s not refining complex images into neat, stylised abstractions. On the contrary, as he sees it, he starts with neat abstractions and gradually introduces them to the real world. He works from “a clear simple abstract place . . . of pure logic . . . towards an image that incorporates the human reality of confusion and fallibility.” As he has said: “There is a paradox in what I do and where I live. In a way, looking at my work . . . I’d be better off living in Berlin or New York.”
Tyrrell was born in Trim, Co Meath, in 1950. He’s pointed out that the strong character of the historical architecture in the area impacted on his work. The Norman castle, for example, with its huge square keep, each face of which features a square turret in the centre, could have been designed by Tyrrell, so close is its plan to one of his paintings. He attended NCAD in the early 1970s. Among his contemporaries were Martin Gale, Brian Maguire and Michael Cullen. After college he remained in Dublin for 10 years, living and working in a capacious, if fairly rundown, Georgian building on Mountjoy Square.
The leap from there to remote Beara may seem extreme but it was actually a more reasonable progression than if he’d been moving from the comfort of the suburbs. Given that Trim and Beara are where he’s spent most of his life, it’s appropriate that the exhibition will travel to Cork, where it will be seen at the Crawford Art Gallery (May 13th-July 2nd).
The work in the Solstice covers a period from late-2009 to the beginning of this year. It’s immediately noticeable that there’s an abiding darkness to it, a sombre note that may or may not have to do with what was going on in the country throughout this time: he doesn’t make representational images, but the working process is open-ended, allowing anything in, opening up spaces of possibility.
The paintings feature formats and divisions of several kinds, including simple horizontal lines that inescapably evoke landscape, broad cruciforms that, as Murphy notes, effectively block off any suggestion of landscape, narrow strips running alongside squares, and sequences of three ellipses arranged either vertically or horizontally.
That makes the paintings sound a bit rarefied and schematic, but they are not. The great virtue of Tyrrell’s work is that each piece, because of the rigour of its making, has had to make a case for itself on its own terms. If it didn’t convince him after a lengthy period of reflection and negotiation, it wouldn’t be there. Through a process of addition and subtraction, each is built to a slow, considered surface of grave beauty. Rather than depicting the landscape, each painting is a landscape, scarred and pitted with the history of its own making, and visually engrossing. You don’t have to try to figure out what it means, just look at it.
Charles Tyrrell, New Work, Solstice Arts Centre, Railway St, Navan. Until May 6th
