Back in 1985, the painter and printmaker Albert Irvin said in an interview that he was "looking forward to entering the great late period. I'm painting with more zest and concentrated energy than ever before. There's so much I want to do, so much I feel I'm about to discover." Brave words coming from a man who was, at the time, not far short of retirement age. But he has more than lived up to them in the intervening period and happily, 16 years on, he is still working with undiminished zip and enthusiasm, as demonstrated by his recent show at the West Cork Arts Centre, and his current participation in the Master Printmakers show at the Kilkenny Arts Festival.
In his Notes of a Painter, Henri Matisse wrote about dreaming of an art "devoid of troubling or depressing subject-matter, an art which might be for every mental worker, be he businessman or writer, like an appeasing influence, like a mental soother, something like a good armchair in which to rest from physical fatigue." Irvin's work is energetic, and tends to give the viewer's eyes a good work-out, but in all other respects it pretty much conforms to Matisse's prescription. In this it adopts a minority position in the context of 20th- and, thus far, 21st-century art.
The more general view would be that there is a price to be paid for indulgence in optical delights, that pleasure entails a proportionate level of guilt. Or, as the Irish artist Brian Maguire expressed it once: he would love to just paint something uncomplicatedly nice, like a bunch of flowers, but when he set out to do so, other aspects of the world tended to get in the way. Often, besides, art that seeks purely to soothe and reassure does so in terms of nostalgic pastiche, through the evocation of a notional world of stylistic and emotional certainties. The results can be grotesque and, worse, are usually false.
Much rarer is an emotionally buoyant art that rings true.
Perhaps that is why seriousness of purpose tends to be equated with seriousness of content. All the more reason, then, to cherish Irvin, who makes paintings and prints that are distinctly upbeat, that delight in the use of bright colour (he is not averse to dark colours, incidentally), and that offer no spurious reassurances. His work is in fact challenging because it is underpinned by a fairly tough painterly intelligence.
Irvin was born in London in 1922. He had begun to study art, at Northampton, prior to serving with the RAF during the second World War, from 1941. After being demobbed in 1946, he completed his studies at Goldsmiths College in London, where he later went on to teach for many years. When he gave up teaching, in 1983, his productivity increased dramatically.
His new freedom acted as a genuine spur to creativity rather than marking, as so often, a lapse into purposelessness. His paintings and prints are kaleidoscopic arrangements of colour. Board games such as draughts, noughts and crosses or chess sometimes come to mind in the way he works towards eventual images via a succession of instinctive moves, often upping the ante dramatically with unlikely and audacious colour combinations. There are edges, lines and shapes in his pictures, but essentially for Irvin colour is form. That is to say, neither colour itself nor tonal variation is devoted to describing anything or creating an image of something other than the painting itself. But there is a distinct pictorial space in his work and he does have something like an habitual repertoire of colour forms from which more or less all his works are built.
His broad, boldly stated lines, disks, rings, stripes and angles are deployed against the framework of an implicit background grid. All of these elements are roughly geometric, but delivered informally, with tremendous gestural freedom and pace. And they usually tilt away from the vertical and the horizontal, picking up energy by means of this shift towards the diagonal, and giving the pictorial structure an edge of instability, a precariousness and dynamism.
The images are built up in layers, variously opaque and translucent, but they never become clogged or heavy. There is always an airiness to them, sometimes literally so, in the way plumes of diffuse white recall vapour-trails drawn across the sky. Again, it seems appropriate to cite Matisse when he wrote of "colour being essential to our sense of space and freedom". A sense of space and freedom is an apt description of the effect of Irvin's work.
Matisse had a particular conception of space in mind, percipiently pointing out that the extraordinary growth in air travel - he was writing in 1945 - had given humans a novel sense of space: "Each age brings with it its own light, its particular feeling for space, as a definite need." During the 20th century, he suggests, we were gaining "a new understanding of the sky, of the expanse of space..." and acquiring a need for "the total possession of this space". The key to painting this new subject-matter was colour, because "colour helps to express light, not the physical phenomenon, but the only light that really exists, that in the artist's brain". Colour, space and light are the key ingredients of Irvin's style, and the way that he employs all of them derives from a way of seeing that not only came into being during his own lifetime, but one that he has helped to shape.
Master Printmakers, with work by Irvin, Louis le Brocquy, Leon Kossof and Tony O'Malley at Grennan Mill, Thomastown, Co Kilkenny from tomorrow as part of the Kilkenny Arts Festival (www.kilkennyarts.ie)