EIGSE, the Carlow Arts festival, continues to set a high level in its art exhibitions, choosing people who are not merely "names" but are also men and women of individual talent which quite a surprising number of fashionable artists are not. This year, the two top billing artists are John Hoyland in painting and Conor Fallon in sculpture, hung in adjoining spaces in St Patrick's College.
Hoyland was born in 1934, which makes him just a few years younger than David Hockney or Howard Hodgkin. He has little obviously in common with either, apart from the fact that London in the Sixties nurtured all three of them and gave them their heads. Hoyland seemingly began as a figurative painter, but his figurativism did not last long, and for over 30 years he has been resolutely abstract. Out of fashion for a time, he has recently recaptured whatever ground he had lost.
Like many or most of his generation in Britain, Hoyland felt the impact of American art, and his earlier pictures had something in common with certain figures of the New York School such as Hans Hofmann. They were generally painted in rectangles, bands and triangles "wodges," one critic called them of colour, often red or blue, and with the paint laid on thick. They were, perhaps, rather one dimensional in vision, but they had the uninhibited, brash, "liberated" spirit of the period.
His style has changed greatly since then, and the pictures on view in Carlow are much more swirling, free and calligraphic, though again the basic shapes are laid on thick. Hoyland started using acrylic paints almost as soon as they appeared, and the slightly edgy, hard quality of acrylic suits his mentality like a tailored glove fits a hand. Energy, glow and a kind of restless pulse in the colour are his chief qualities, and like his contemporaries Hodgkins and Malcolm Morley, he belongs to that type of Englishman who is in reaction against the outward drabness of English life and seeks after colour, exoticism and reverberant light.
Conor Fallon's exhibition is dominated by the bleakly powerful group sculpture he made for the Famine exhibition originally mounted in Claremorris and still, it seems, destined for tour in America. This consists of three black cauldrons, weathered and holed, with predatory crows perched on them and picking them bare an utterly direct, harshly emotional but not unsubtle ensemble piece, whose effect is augmented by its funereal black.
There is also a remarkable Salmon of Knowledge in bronze, incorporating inscribed lettering, and various of his bird and animal pieces, which combine an almost Expressionist "bite" with formal values learned chiefly from the great School of Paris sculptors. Fallon these days is equally at ease in steel and in bronze and exploits easily the qualities of both. It is not a huge exhibition in terms of numbers, but it is thoughtfully selected and spaciously mounted, making it in effect a kind of mini retrospective.
OF the invited painters and sculptors, Shani Rhys James shows soulful self portraits set against various backgrounds a studio in terror, etc. which are rather reminiscent of the early John Bratby in his raw, aggressive, Kitchen Sink phase, though the colour is hotter than his, even Expressionist. John Boyd's small, quasi surreal, rather mannered pictures are almost monotonous in colour, but with an individual, sharp focus quality which summons your attention.
Nancy Wynne Jones, David Crone, Gwen O'Dowd, Rita Duffy are all, in their very different ways, established painters, but the surprise of this section to me, anyway are the paintings of Pat Harris, known in Dublin for his exhibitions in the Taylor Galleries. They are more traditional, and much less spiky and angular, than his earlier pictures, but they treat landscape and other familiar themes with a good deal of tonal subtlety and an easy, painterly touch.
Invited sculptors include Cathy Carman, whose bronzes characteristically twist like African totems, John Kindness (animals in mosaic and other unconventional media, created with a very prominent element of humour, but fully sculptural in their own right), Patricia Looby (multi media pieces with a baroque, almost macabre character), Stephen Rothschild (quasi improvised animals and other subjects in wood and "found" materials). Three young painters, Jacqueline Askew, Hilary Elmes and Paula Minchin, are given a kind of mini exhibition of their own close by.
All these shows are mounted in the college and run until June 15th the old site of the Presentation Convent (now the Eigse Centre) meanwhile houses a small but varied exhibition of works by third year NCAD students. This particular space, however (an upstairs room), is really no asset, and it is obvious that Carlow's facilities for mounting exhibitions are limited and currently strained to the limit. Surely this thriving, lively town merits its own arts centre?
There is no lack of exhibition space in the Manton Studios, about four miles out of the town just off the Kilkenny road. Here seven artists are featured Elizabeth Cope, Doreen Brown, Tony O'Malley, Bob Lynn, Bobby McClean, Bridget Flannery, Catherine Greene, Eileen McDonagh. Almost inevitably, O'Malley is a dominant presence and the venue has the wall space needed to mount several of his large, recent paintings. Catherine Greene and Eileen McDonagh are both interesting sculptors the one in bronze, the other in limestone and McClean's quasi expressionist paintings are vehement and personal. (Until June 16th).
This year, too, there has been a strong emphasis on crafts in Eigse, and at the Pembroke Studio Bev Carbery has organised art exhibition called Pots and Poetry, which includes paintings but concentrates on a strong contrasting range of ceramics. Exhibitors include Bev Carbery herself, Michelle Dempsey, Brian Keogh, Etain Hickey among others, and a token representation by Loui Mulcahy and Antonio Cebas McBride recently seen in Tralee (until June 21st). In the Deighton Hall, a big and crowded almost overcrowded craft exhibition includes pottery, ceramics, woodturnin jewellery, even stained glass. (Until Sunday?)
