"THE thing that I knew in theory, but which didn't become real until it actually happened, was that the relationship with somebody powerful in your life, like a father, doesn't end when they die. You play the tapes of memory over and over, and my relationship with him will continue as long as I live." Justin Keating's documentary portrait of his father, the painter Sean Keating, is a very personal exploration, not just of his life and art, but of the relationship between father and son.
"I had initially wanted to make a much more direct life and times film about him. It turned out that nobody was interested in that, but the project also took on a life of its own. I'm not an art historian and I don't claim that expertise anywhere in the film but how could I tell the truth about him without putting him into context? So we included my mother, my brother and then, very reluctantly at first, I let my own feelings and reactions come into it. I think it's probably more interesting for that.
Three generations of Keatings are brought together in the film through the involvement, as director, of Justin's son, David, whose feature film The Last of the High Kings is currently on cinema release. "Our relationship is pretty good I may have driven him mad but, for me, David is a joy to work with and you certainly couldn't guarantee that with a father and son relationship."
Justin's sometimes difficult relationship with his own father is explored in the film through a series of conversations with his brother Michael about their family memories. Some of those memories are painful although, according to Justin, he and Sean "had the vast good fortune of finding each other before he died".
THE documentary also includes extraordinary colour footage of life on the Aran Islands during the 1930s - brief snatches of vivid imagery which Sean Keating used as a notebook for his work. "He got that 16mm movie camera in the early 1930s. The quality of the composition of all those pictures is so striking. They're very moving."
Justin believes that his father's life was so long and so complex that he is a difficult subject for scholarly work: "You'd have to know a lot of history as well as art history to tackle the subject." He regrets that the pictures which are most often reproduced are the paintings of IRA flying columns from the War of Independence. "Those were painted in the six months between the Truce and the beginning of the Civil War. Immediately the Civil War broke out, he turned completely against that point of view. His picture Allegory is a ferocious denunciation of brother killing brother.
"The man that I remember despised any kind of physical force. Although most of his family took the anti Treaty side, he forcefully supported the Treaty, saying that we should take what was available and that nothing was worth the deaths of young men. I think his intention with the flying column pictures was simply to record what they looked like, rather than to make heroes of them, which is what has beep read into them afterwards."
According to Justin, there are close affinities between his father's paintings and the work of 20th century, Scandinavian artists, in their concern with the external events in the history of a young, new country. "In that sense and in his devotion to the idea of skill, he was old fashioned but to class him as an academic painter is nonsense. Nobody could have despised what he called chocolate box painting more than, he did.
In some ways the film can be seen as a parallel, personal history of this country in the 20th century. In that sense it is also a chronicle of disappointed dreams and disillusionment, both for father and son. "Yes, his life was a series of disillusionments, which is true of most people of high aspiration. I would say that most people of the aspirational Left, in which I would include both him and myself, feel disappointed and lost."
Over the decades, Sean Keating searched for an ideal which he could believe in, says his son. "He went through a period of thinking that national development through electrification and the metaphor of light was important. Then in the early 1930s he was anti fascist, well before it was fashionable, and then he was a Left wing socialist up until the late 1940s, when you couldn't excuse what was coming out of Stalinist Russia anymore.
"His late pictures of Aran are more elegiac. They don't have that energy of the earlier pictures. He saw the destruction of the thing that he loved through the process of describing how much he loved it. So, although his style didn't change enormously over the years, his content did and that makes him difficult to deal with for the art historian."
