There's landscape and there's landscape. Harry Vince Coulter's paintings, currently showing in two exhibitions, one in Tinahely, Co Wicklow, and the other in Castlebar, could be described as landscape - he's quite happy to apply the term himself - but they belie the word's conservative associations.
He is more aligned with those artists, such as John Virtue or David Hockney, who see landscape in terms of dynamic experience. When he titles paintings Walking Around Lough Gill or Driving By Mount Leinster, it gives some indication of the kind of approach he takes. Not that he has to be on the move all the time - there's also Staring at the Sea, Eastwards, and Watching the Yellow Grow Deeper, Hook Peninsula.
The common denominator is change. Changes in viewpoint as you negotiate the space, and changes over time, as daylight dawns or fades, as the weather shuttles across. The fantastic mobility of the Irish weather, the dramas played out in the skies, particularly on the west coast, must be an important factor in shaping his work. An Icelandic saying could be applied verbatim here: In Ireland we don't have weather, we have examples of weather.
Certainly, what you see in the paintings is change. Their brisk rhythms can set your eyes dancing and skidding around their energised surfaces. Wedges of colour cut in from the sides at angles that knock you off balance. Even when you can more or less get your bearings and pin down water, headland and sky, for example, it's at least as much a question of feeling as of visual resemblance.
Then there the issue of colour. Vince Coulter uses very pure, saturated colour: zinging, punchy, vibrant blues, yellows and reds. They get muddied and knocked down a little when they mix and mingle on the canvas, but they are still pitched rather higher than the atmospheric greys we habitually associate with Irish landscape.
He's not alone here. Charles Harper and Coilin Murray, to name but two, have adopted a similarly brash strategy. People do comment, though, on "the colour thing," as he calls it. "I don't have a problem with it. I know some people do. The fact is that colour and tone in my paintings are far away from realism. Why it's still an issue is a bit of a mystery to me. It's never been a problem on the far side of the Atlantic."
His attitude to colour, which can be summed up in one rhetorical question (why not use it?) is certainly influenced by his art education background in the latter half of the 1960s. The Tinahely show is called Returning, and with reason. As he points out, during the 1970s, "I virtually stopped painting for many years." He had studied at the Chelsea School of Art at a high-point in its history. The celebrated English painter, John Hoyland, was one of his tutors. Hoyland had been to New York in 1964, and had met the American abstract painters, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski and Morris Louis.
American colour field painting was a direct influence on Hoyland and on many other artists on this side of the Atlantic, including Vince Coulter. He rates Noland as a particular influence, one still evident in the chevron-shaped motifs that turn up in some of his paintings, as well as in his use of colour and his technique of staining directly into the un-whitened canvas.
Of his earlier phase of activity he says: "Eventually I was making paintings as near to being objects as they could be without becoming conceptual."
HAVING set out to de-construct painting, he decided that "what it was about was paint itself". With a friend, he devised a way of making paintings that consisted purely of paint, no canvas or other support, using a strong polyvinyl medium. Then, like many other artists in the 1970s, he moved out of painting.
Having worked in computer graphics and other areas, he was prompted to take it up again in the late 1980s. Strangely enough, Irish landscape provided the stimulus though, as he acknowledges, while he was making small, collaged works on paper, he was initially reluctant to actually call them landscapes. He found it a slow process. "I hadn't stopped thinking about painting, but thinking about it is not the same as painting. It took me about five years to get back onstream, I'd say."
This investment of time is evident in his sureness of touch, the casual precision of his mark-making, evidence of expertise worn lightly.
He found himself drawn to two main regions, Mayo-Sligo and Wicklow-Wexford. He worked partly from photos. "But I never addressed places in terms of single images. This came from talking to people about particular places. If you visit somewhere you see it as a single image, but if you spend time there you know it in a different way. Listening to people describing places they knew well, I became interested in getting a sense of that familiarity. I'd return to the places over and over in different conditions, at different seasons, at different times." In effect one canvas is a multiple image.
While there is an incredible spaciousness to these images, there is, as he says firmly, "no perspective. The picture plane is always there, which I suppose has to do with my training. The pictures have to do with the mood of a place."
He's wary about the notion of producing composite images, however, even though he still uses collage. "I prefer them to be integral and organic, not cut-and-pasted, which is a technique familiar from computers." It is striking that as someone with a wealth of experience in new technology, he is opting for such a venerable, pre-electronic art form.
"Painting is different. You can do things with it that you cannot otherwise achieve. And the only program you need is the human brain - and experience."
Returning: Recent Paintings, is at the Tinahely Courthouse Centre, Co Wicklow, until December 24th.
Mountains & Bays: Mayo/Sligo Paintings is at the Linenhall Arts Centre, Castlebar, Co Mayo, until December 22nd
