Stephen McKenna has spent his life travelling in search of inspiration, painting the spaces in which he lived. He might have stopped moving, but he continues to ignore artistic fashion, he tells Aidan Dunne.
Stephen McKenna is drawn, time and again, to paint pictures of the sea. Not, as he is quick to point out, maritime paintings - "which are usually paintings of ships and boats, something else altogether" - but paintings of water. He notes that Angel Gonzalez Garcia, who wrote the substantial, discursive and richly informative text for the publication that accompanies his exhibition at the RHA Gallagher Gallery, largely gives his paintings of the sea a miss: "Because he said they are an impossibility. You just can't have paintings of water." One can of course make paintings in which water becomes a mirror, reflecting and even amplifying the visual richness of everything around it.
McKenna does that, in numerous ways, but he also has a good go at depicting water itself. In his distinctive, slowed-down mode of representation, which can verge on the visually pedantic, he has made paintings that regard the process of waves breaking in a deliberate, analytical way, or map the crests and troughs of a stretch of water as though they are the peaks and valleys of a mountain range, or depict a drenching shower of rain. All of which is typical of him: a basic stubbornness, a fierce commitment to the idea that one ought to be able to take on anything in painting, and a way of working that can produce paintings poised on an edge between elegance and awkwardness.
A tall, commanding presence at large in Dublin he is the very model of a tweedy country gentleman, which is, to some extent, what he is. He lives in Bagenalstown, Co Carlow, and has been greatly inspired by the well-husbanded surrounding landscape. When he first saw the River Barrow, he has written, it reminded him of a river landscape by Aelbert Cuyp in the National Gallery in London: "Without doubt a vision of Arcadia." And his pictorial accounts of the countryside are likewise Arcadian. Having led a notably peripatetic existence as a painter, he says that he is going to stay put in Bagenalstown, where he has made a large, versatile studio of which he is obviously very fond. His father was from Donegal, and McKenna also spends time painting there every year, as well as working for brief periods abroad.
Born in London in 1939, he was inculcated with the habit of restlessness from an early age. His father was in the army and the family's whereabouts depended on his postings, which included Oslo immediately after the second World War.
Eventually McKenna settled for a time in London, attending the Slade School of Art and staying on in the city to work, though less than happily. At art school he absorbed an abstract, modernist aesthetic and was painting large-scale works roughly in the manner of American post-painterly abstractionists such as Morris Louis. But quite quickly he found himself out of sympathy with the two dominant artistic trends in London: pop art and conceptualism. Pop art simply never interested him, and, he argues that "all art is conceptual". But a material engagement with paint is central to what he does.
He found himself "going back to figurative painting", and not in an ironic or parodic way. "Friends and colleagues thought I'd lost it." Offered a studio in Germany for a few months in 1971, he accepted, without any great expectations. But to his surprise, things were different in Germany. There was a sense of a continental culture that he had hardly touched on.
"There was a more complex attitude to painting. I found that there were people who were actually interested in what I was doing."
Over time, what he was doing took the form of a considered reappraisal of the classical European tradition in painting. In applying himself to all of the established genres, McKenna looks to the work of painters such as Claude, Titian, Poussin and, latterly and significantly, the Italian Giorgio de Chirico, a self-styled pictor classicus who, though in Paris from 1911, took quite a different pictorial route to the Fauves and the Cubists. It wasn't de Chirico but his colleague, Carlo Carra, who formalised some of their shared artistic ideas in a text, Metaphysical Painting, arguing for the continued viability of Renaissance pictorial methods while accommodating such contemporary notions as, for example, the unconscious.
If the Italian metaphysical painters were important for McKenna on a philosophical level (as they seem to have been), they were also, in a related way, a vital visual influence. Apart from the ambitious reach of his subject matter, the emphatic clarity and representational simplicity - which is not another way of saying naivety - of his style is recognisably sympathetic to the work of de Chirico and the great still-life painter Giorgio Morandi. Perhaps coloured by such influences, there is a certain analytical distance to McKenna's take on the themes and subjects of Western painting, but it would be simply wrong to interpret this detachment as indifference. On the contrary, one is reminded time and again in his work of the immediacy of the Western tradition and its philosophical and mythological underpinnings.
In time, with no thought of fashion, McKenna found he was a fashionable artist. The renewed receptivity to painting that developed towards the end of the 1970s worked in his favour. A number of exhibitions put him firmly on the map by the mid-80s. He remembers this as an odd time, good in many respects, but odd. He moved more than ever, spending time in Belgium, London, Germany. From 1973 he had re-established links with Donegal because his father had retired there. At one point, he says, he had four studios on the go. That phase passed.
"I never learned to follow fashion," he remarks with a smile. "But it's better to stay where you ought to be rather than try to. In fact it's foolish to do otherwise."
He went to Italy, without particularly intending to spend a long time there but, as with Germany, ended up settling in. In fact, Italy was enormously fruitful in artistic terms. Many of his best and most beautiful interiors and landscapes were painted there.
GARCIA'S TEXT GREW out of a rather brilliant idea. He considered McKenna as a painter always on the move, always looking for something. That something, as the title of a show McKenna curated for the Irish Museum of Modern Art indicates, is painting itself. The exhibition, The Pursuit of Painting, articulated his personal taste and his ideas of what painting could or should try to achieve.
Over and above a sense of place, Garcia suggests, McKenna's true home is the "house of painting". In a sense that is true of most painters, in that the house of painting could be taken to be the studio, and the studio is central to the lives of painters. As McKenna puts it: "The studio is my natural home."
What makes it particularly apposite in his case, though, is his exceptional predilection for painting the spaces in which he lives and works. These spaces acquire a symbolic weight and significance: they come to stand for the potential space offered by representation, the room for manoeuvre afforded by artistic activity.
With the pragmatism of the working artist, McKenna also takes a down-to-earth view of this: "I have moved around a lot, and wherever I move, what I see around me produces a new crop of images. Often there has been a sense of urgency about this because I wasn't sure how long I was going to be there. But funnily enough in Bagenalstown, where I know I'm going to stay, the studio has so far provided just one picture. I've tended to paint the landscape much more."
He has put a lot of thought into his show at the RHA, which, though it is not anything like a full retrospective, does provide a generous account of what he has been doing for the last 30 years and a little more, with an emphasis on the more recent work.
One of the most fascinating things about it is the inclusion of an entire room of drawings and works on paper. Many of these are not only beautiful in their own right, but also extremely informative of the paintings relating - sometimes very closely - to them. Furthermore, as McKenna notes, the drawings "are the one chronological aspect of the exhibition. The paintings are arranged thematically". But drawing is fundamental to everything he does. A painting usually emerges from weeks, even months of drawing.
Though he is often described as a latter-day classical painter, McKenna is wary of the term. While he did see himself as a classicist, he now takes a broader view. He argues that the distinction between classical and romantic, for example, is hardly tenable. Anyway, "it's romantic to try to be a classical artist in the 21st century", he smiles. Besides, he feels, the classical preoccupation with form raises another question. "I think what interests me most is intangible. Water, air, space, not form." Which brings us back to water and the impossibility of painting it. "Painting teaches one to see. I try to paint not things but the gaps between things. If you get that right when people look they can see it too."
The Nissan Art Project: Stephen McKenna is at the Royal Hibernian Academy Gallagher Gallery, Dublin, until Oct 30. Further information from 01-6612558; www.royalhibernianacademy.com