There is a mocking edge to Jack Donovan's depiction of human folly, writes Aidan Dunne
One of last year's cultural highlights was the Jack Donovan retrospective at the Limerick City Art Gallery. Now an edited version of that show is on view at Draíocht, in Blanchardsatown, Dublin. It's good that Dublin gets to see the work, and characteristic of the man that the venue is, in relative terms, off-Broadway, for Donovan has spent a great deal of his life backing out of the limelight.
Now in his 70s, in person he is charming, sharp and erudite, with a dry wit and a stoical demeanour. Clearly he saves the more flamboyant, theatrical side of his personality for his painting.
Over the years that painting has won him a wide circle of admirers. Once seen, his pictures lodge in the mind. His subject is the human comedy, and he situates it within a dramatic framework that combines personal memory, anecdote and the broader currents of history. A teeming cast of disparate but oddly complementary characters cross paths and interact against a range of stylised backdrops: domestic interior, castle, balcony, beach, brothel, circus, city. Jacobites, prostitutes, biblical and Shakespearean characters, clerics and clowns, Punch and Judy, vamps and fools, voyeurs and exhibitionists, and indeed the artist himself in various guises, all feature as performers in an endless series of farcical tableaux.
There is a mocking edge to Donovan's depiction of human folly. In the images we come across as mad, deluded creatures, in thrall to ambition and desire, doomed to ruin and ignominy and ridicule.
The candy colours and toy-like trappings serve to accentuate rather than contradict an underlying darkness, a darkness evident in historical atrocities, the crucifixion, the cruelty of Punch, predatory sexuality and, a recurrent element, patriarchal authority. But it's also evident in the dead black eyes of all his protagonists, something that, he was surprised to note, has been a consistent feature in over 30 years of painting.
Donovan was born in Limerick in 1934. His father was a chemist in Rathkeale, his mother died when he was just a couple of weeks old, something he learned only 10 years or so later. He'd assumed his aunt, who his father had subsequently married, was his mother. He remembers his grandparents' house, Grouse Lodge. Its spaces, particularly the nursery and the half-door in the kitchen, feature recurrently in his paintings. An ancestor, he was told, fought at the Battle of the Boyne. More, his work is saturated with the detail of local history: the siege of Limerick, the story that inspired Griffin and Boucicault's Colleen Bawn, the poets' court at the Mungret Gate presided over by Sean O Tuama.
One could be forgiven for thinking that he is anti-clerical, given the satirical humour of such works as Bishop's Lady, in which a half-dressed woman regards us over her shoulder from a room strewn with a bishop's regalia. It's more a case, though, that Donovan is instinctively suspicious of authority in pretty much any guise, and particularly of authority in the form of revealed religion.
Already theologically suspicious in his early teens, he happened upon the writings of Charles Darwin and, as he says in his interview with Mike Fitzpatrick, it "dawned on me that our whole history of civilisation is based on a false premise".
His artistic ability led him to Limerick School of Art. It was a culturally conservative environment, proud of its academic tradition, as exemplified by Sean Keating, Dermod O Brien and Tom Ryan. The arrival of a Scot, Pat McEvoy, as head introduced a more open-minded appreciation of post-impressionism, though even he couldn't really see beyond that. Donovan began to teach art without ever intending to and then, extraordinarily, aged only 28, he found the job of head of the art school thrust upon him. He was, as might be expected, an unorthodox head, but a popular one. In time he set up his easel out on the stairwell and taught by example. His ex-students, including painter John Shinnors, speak of him with exceptional warmth and respect.
He sparked a brief flurry of controversy by introducing a nude model into the life room, but the city learned to cope. More provocative and transgressive, perhaps, was his strategy of incorporating fragments of images from soft porn magazines in his paintings, unmistakably sexualising the academicised category of "the nude".
Part of the considerable mythology surrounding his persona related to his drinking. He speaks candidly about his binge-drinking, a pattern identical to that followed by his father. There is a curiously ascetic aspect to this, in that drinking alternated with long periods of intense, sober work.
Now retired from teaching, he lives and breathes painting. While we identify him with tightly constructed, stylised figure compositions, built from forms distilled into an elegant shorthand of blocks of vivid, flat colour, simultaneously he has maintained the practice of naturalistic portraiture - though not on commission. In both strands he comes across as a remarkably capable, astute, self-critical artist. Last year, at his home in Co Limerick, close to where he grew up, he surveyed a selection of his work for the retrospective. He noted the continual dialogue in the paintings between the rigour of black-and-white and the luxuriance of colour, classical and rococo. And that duality goes to the heart of what he's about: sense and sensuality, tragedy and comedy.
• Jack Donovan: Retrospective Paintings 1959-2004, runs at Draíocht, Blanchardstown, Dublin, until May 21. Tel: 01-8852610 www.draiocht.ie