Diana Copperwhite is a young artist from Patrickswell in Co Limerick. She first caught the public eye with her NCAD degree show in 1994, when she sold everything she exhibited - and aroused a great deal of favourable comment. It's not too difficult to see why. Here was an artist who wasn't afraid to follow her own instincts. In the midst of the standard art school fare of dystopian installations and research projects masquerading as art, it was undeniably refreshing to encounter someone who painted big pictures, with bright colours, intelligently. In the meantime she has had her first one-person show, at Temple Bar. Her new work, in her current exhibition at the Rubicon Gallery, may surprise some people because it is more abstract than her earlier, very architectonic compositions, and it is much more tonal - "much closer to me," she says - than the heightened colours she has previously favoured. Not that there isn't a lot of colour. In fact, all the evidence suggests that she really loves colour, relishing the subtle varieties of pinks, greens and blues that she has devised.
"I've also been trying to work with purples and yellows. Purple is a very difficult colour. Greens and blues are easy to use; it's very simple to make them work, but then you find yourself doing things because they're easy." Like many painters, she is curiously reluctant to label a work as finished. Less than a week before her show opened, she was still busy in her studio, high above the streets of the North Inner City, hauling canvases around, tweaking and adjusting, remarkably calm but also incredibly intense about it all.
The studio is organised chaos, the plastic-covered floor encrusted with drips and splashes of paint, and densely carpeted with tins and tubes of pigment and innumerable containers of mixed colours. She applies paint with broad house-painters' brushes. As she works she spends a great deal of time just looking, juxtaposing canvasses, considering them in different lights and combinations. "It's better if they're ugly early on," she remarks of her working process. "Then you're working towards something. But if they're nice in a sort of pathetic way at the beginning it can be difficult. You're reluctant to lose it and that's fatal." One small painting features a ragged orange oval. She mentions in passing that she happened to read A Clockwork Orange recently and thought she might use the title, but opted for the much more cryptic Clock instead. "Because the painting isn't about it, in that sense." The relationship is illuminating about her work, though. What appealed to her was Anthony Burgess's linguistic inventiveness; how you have to learn a new dialect to read the book. She doesn't say it, but the implication is that you have to learn to look at her paintings in a similar way.
Her father, Patrick Copperwhite, a retired science teacher, is a self-taught painter himself (he exhibited earlier this year at the Oriel Gallery). "He'd love to have gone to art college. He's a good painter. His work is representational, but he has no problem relating to any kind of painting." He was a bit apprehensive, though, when she opted for art school. As a gesture towards practicality, she enrolled in the graphic design course - two of her three siblings are involved in design. "It seemed like a reasonable thing to do. I was drawing all the time. But I hated it. I started doing the painting projects instead of the graphics projects and after a year I switched to fine art. I made very linear, representational drawings, but the minute I picked up a paintbrush I started making these very fluid, very tonal compositions. In Limerick Bob Baker was great as a painting tutor, and I did the diploma there, then went on to do a degree at NCAD." That was a different kettle of fish. "I found it hard to adjust. It took me two years instead of one. You're hassled more at NCAD, you have to defend yourself more. On reflection I think that's a good thing. By the time you're through, you feel you've really earned your niche."
People, she says, tend to either like her work or hate it. She knows that painting per se is not where it's at. "Of course I'm aware of that attitude. On one level it bothers me, but when I'm in the studio doing what I want to do it doesn't bother me at all. There is a kind of insularity here. Not many interesting painting shows get here, but you can see them if you go abroad. In London you get the feeling that painting is as relevant and interesting as any art form. It's great to go to the Saatchi Gallery, for example, and see it full of paintings." She regards the work of others with the same analytical rigour that she brings to her own. When she mentions contemporary painters whose work she likes, she usually specifies particular paintings, or kinds of paintings. Of the dynamics of her own work she says at one point: "It sometimes seems to me that each painting is like a battle between the introverted and extroverted sides of my character. I try to maintain the tension between the two."
After a moment she adds: "In reality I think I'm neither an introvert nor an extrovert." This is not to say that the work is about introversion and extroversion. "If you're constantly worried over what it's about you lose spontaneity." Humour is also important. "That's why titles can be significant. I'd hate to be regarded as a painter of solemn, pretentious pictures. At the end of the day, paint is just coloured stuff."
New Paintings by Diana Copperwhite can be seen at the Rubicon Gallery until September 12th.
