Seán McSweeney is the real thing: passionate, inspired and daring. They'reall qualities on show in an exhibition of work gathered from his family,writes Eileen Battersby.
Passion and energy, curiosity and a practical romanticism shape the art of Seán McSweeney, artist, inspired colourist and risk-taker. He has never settled into a comfortable, complacent formula. Long after a first viewing his pictures continue to speak; they evoke, they record, they live.
Clearly part of the great Irish romantic landscape tradition of Jack B Yeats and Patrick Collins, he also looks to the American abstract expressionism of two transplanted Europeans: Willem de Kooning and, most emphatically, Mark Rothko. Of all Ireland's major visual artists, McSweeney has retained a questing sense of vitality. He sees each new picture as an adventure possessing another set of mysteries, further questions and possibilities. There is a candour about his romanticism.
As he walks through the gallery space of the Civic Theatre in Tallaght, Co Dublin, where his new show, Family Collection, hangs until May 27th, he says: "I learned to paint by looking at great paintings. I grew up quite close to the Hugh Lane Gallery, or the Municipal Gallery as it was known then. My father was a painter and decorator by trade; he also made paintings."
Patrick McSweeney died in a horrific accident in 1941 while working with the ESB at Poolbeg generating station in Dublin. McSweeney, who was five years old at the time, has never forgotten the shock of his father not returning home that day. "I had the use of his box of paints. His paintings were also around the house, and my mother kept him alive for us."
Referring to artists such as Emil Nolde and Georges Rouault, he also recalls the impact de Kooning, Rothko and Robert Motherwell had on him when he later saw the Living Art and Johnson Wax exhibitions in Dublin featuring those great American artists. "You'd look at their pictures, original paintings by living artists, and feel that you'd seen something exciting."
Few artists are as capable as McSweeney of articulating the physical and emotional experience of looking at art. No artist is as unpretentious or as real. His is a practical artistic intelligence engaged with what he sees.
His new show is not quite new. It consists of work spanning his entire career, from the mid 1950s to the present; some of it familiar, some of it previously unseen, but all united by being owned by members of the McSweeney family. "I see it as a kind of family scrapbook. It would have come about by birthday presents to the children over the years and Christmas cards."
Each work has its own story, and his two central worlds, those of the Wicklow and Sligo landscapes, are present alongside glimpses of the personal. "These are works that have travelled from studio to studio. I'd decided that rather than let them out, I'd give them to the children."
A family ritual had already been established. Sheila, his wife, selects a painting from each exhibition and the five McSweeney children have, in turn, been presented with a painting on their 21st birthday. Other pictures have been given - or claimed. Tadgh, the youngest, also a painter and now McSweeney's framer, selects a work such as Evening Pool (2002) in exchange for time spent making frames. It is a beautiful picture, possessing, as McSweeney says, "a sense of the wet bogland and of the immediate experience of walking through it. I go back out into the landscape and see it at that moment and it also triggers off memory. There's the challenge of marrying form and pigment, the physical side of working with pigment, of seeing the paint and getting it to move. In that particular piece, Evening Pool, the paint just moved right. The magic was there. It's lovely when it is there. There was a rhythm that worked right".
Marshland (1986), the largest picture in the exhibition, belongs to another son, Colmán, McSweeney's former framer. In it, a vivid body of blue water shimmers and moves within a border of rushes and flags and other marshland plants. "It's that soggy land that almost yields when you walk through it. It's one that I sliced through the canvas, by accident, with a palette knife. I was able to repair it."
Blue Pool (1996) is daughter Sally's 21st-birthday present. The surreally lush green of the summer bog meets the dark blue of a saltwater bog pool. "The dramatic green came from mixing lemon yellow and phthalo blue directly on the board. The way I think about that painting is the way I divided it and allowed in that blue pool. It just worked. I like looking at it. Sally has it in her house in Navan."
Shoreline Pool (1990), with its ferns and grasses swaying in the breeze, its pool encircled by bog, with a hint of the white fringe of the nearby sea merely a subtle presence, is familiar to me. A postcard of it leans against books in my study. In the same small room is an enlarged photograph of Bogland Water (1986), a triptych of blue pool surrounded by the ochre of encircling fern, flag and rushes.
On seeing it in McSweeney's studio in 1996, I remember trying to photograph it and, not satisfied with my indoor attempts, he obliged by taking it outside, where he balanced it on two chairs for the photograph. It is Sheila's painting. He remembers working the paint "with my fingers". It is a picture consisting of three paintings, none of which ever appears exactly the same. Unfortunately, the catalogue reproduction is most disappointing, deadening a vibrant work.
The Lovers (1965) is an unusual McSweeney work; not only is there a rare figurative theme - a couple standing in the shadows - but also it is an urban setting. Juxtaposed with the open street and the side of a building, is the intimate presence of the lovers. "You can feel the city" he agrees. "There's the suggestion of it." He gave it to his sister Moira for her wedding - and she has loaned it for the show.
Looking at the pictures offers the viewer an insight into the development of the artist. For McSweeney, it is retracing his footsteps. "I cleaned it and looked at the paint," he says of Trees Near The Lake (1962). It is a dark painting in which the paint is very heavily, almost crudely applied. "It took a lot of cleaning. Then it was reframed, glazed. It's a piece I prefer looking at in a broken light . . . It's one of the works I gave to my daughter Orna." Even from that early in his career, the abstract was always drawing McSweeney.
There is group of three small watercolours, the only watercolours, all figurative, dating from the years spent in Co Wicklow. "There's the garden at Lugglass, the clothes line and Mick Hegarty's old turf shed; it's gone now." They were painted in 1972. Also from that year is a larger work, a bold oil on canvas called The Garden. Although figurative and including a tree and a car, the picture, a present to Stephen, is also true to McSweeney's abstract instincts. "That car was Colmán's, but the picture is Stephen's." Stephen McSweeney also owns Grey Water, painted - or made, as McSweeney tends to say of all of his paintings - in 1959.
Hanging among the Wicklow paintings is Fields Along The King's River. Painted in 1968, it showcases the wonderful greens, enhanced by yellows, that are so central to his vision. It is one of those pictures you feel you can walk into, the yellow catching the emerging gorse of a spring hillside. "It was first exhibited in the Belfast Open exhibition in 1968 and a number of other shows. Sheila liked it and I like it myself: it's one you would bring with you. It's one I keep coming back to. It is Sheila's, but it has been hanging in the studio."
Grey House, Wicklow catches the gable end of the former family home in Lugglass, which is near Hollywood in Co Wicklow. "I gave that to Sally. For me it has that sense of a small holding on the side of a hill - which is what it was. It's a memory thing." The Wicklow pictures also close the chapter on McSweeney's figurative work. On moving to Co Sligo, where his mother came from, he beganto engage fully with a landscape of bog pools, water and light.
Bogland, Ballyconnell (1987), a small, vivid green work with splashes of white-blue water, belongs to Sheila. "For me that's a summer's day with a suggestion of what's beyond, the sea." He owns only one work in the exhibition. Early Spring Pool (1996), one of the rare uprights of the bog and one of most widely coveted works in the exhibition. In it, McSweeney plays with day and night, dictating the light and colour of a bog pool. It also depicts the changes between winter and spring as manifested on the pool.
"I liked it and I just thought, I'll keep it. So I did. There's a dancing thing happening in the spring pool in the upper level, and the lower half shows the winter pool and the dead foliage."
The Grey Pool (2000) was bought by Orna, who saw the painting, liked it and set about buying it. A little girl among the viewers at the opening had no difficulty in nominating it as her favourite work. "It's the night sky: see the stars shining in the water." Each time an adult asked her if she was enjoying the show, she brought them to look at that painting. "It has darkness and light," she said. Its effect is achieved by mottling the paint.
These are fine pictures. McSweeney has over the years acquired a strong following; there is nothing trendy or surface. He is an artist in the truest sense of the word.
Does he miss Wicklow, considering its role in making McSweeney a countryman as well as an artist? "Not that much. In Sligo I have the shoreline. Of course, it was in Wicklow that I got to know the four seasons, landscape, the smell of the fox."
He does not have to miss Wicklow, as his son Colmán still lives in the old house. "I often wonder, if I did spend some time there, what I would make. The light is different in Wicklow; the landscape soaks it up" - well illustrated by Evening Landscape, Wicklow (1968), which is included in the show - "while in the west, in Sligo, the sea acts like a mirror, reflecting the light back."
Family Collection now up and running, he is working on a new exhibition for the John Martin Gallery in London. "I'm back out in the landscape, and I'm looking. Yesterday, I found the first bunch of marsh marigolds. I'm watching the bog pool at the moment. The bogbean has appeared up over the water; they're strange-looking things at the moment, in the way that many young animals look strange at the beginning."
Family Collection is at the Civic Theatre, Tallaght, until May 27th.
