Over the past two decades, Hughie O’Donoghue’s work has assumed epic proportions in terms of scale, treatment and subject matter. Although primarily a painter, O’Donoghue is also a superb draughtsman and printmaker. Internationally renowned, he is currently one of Ireland’s most individual and ambitious practitioners and one who has a profound respect for the discipline of painting. First and foremost a philosophical painter, O’Donoghue acknowledges the primacy of art history and the development of the medium through generations of practitioners. He embraces art historical tradition as a valuable catechism, a resource to visit again and again. The artist admits; ‘The tradition of painting is an extraordinarily rich resource. Tradition as a word seems to have negative connotations for some people but I think of it in terms of knowledge’1 Invariably within the artist’s practice the persistent themes are memory, myth, identity, and history.

Of Irish parentage, Hughie O’Donoghue was born in Manchester in 1953 and spent his childhood there. At the beginning of the 1980s he studied Fine Art at Goldsmith’s College and made his name shortly after this with exhibitions at the Air Gallery and National Gallery, London. He moved to Ireland eight years ago and is currently resident in Co. Kilkenny. O’Donoghue has exhibited widely in the UK and also in the USA, Spain, Italy, Australia, and Germany. He has had exhibitions in Ireland reflecting each decade’s production in the RHA and IMMA in 1998, and the Model Arts and Niland Gallery in 2002.

O’Donoghue’s unique approach to painting reflects his preoccupation with tragedy and monumental events in history. After gaining a commission in Florence, the artist spent over twelve years producing paintings, drawings and prints on the theme of Christ’s Passion and Crucifixion. From that he entered directly into engagement with World War II, making representation of this theme on a macro and micro level: from treating a painterly response to the experience of the obscured individual to interpretations of individual tragic events, overlooked or forgotten due to history’s selective focus. In O’Donoghue’s singular approach nothing is forced. Unlike many painters, he never turns his back on his preceding method and technique. Instead he layers acquired expertize on the existing surface. Rather than abandoning abstraction when it reached a personal conclusion, O’Donoghue incorporated a unique method of figuration into his refined mode of image making. This explains surface qualities and expanses of colour but in a compositional arrangement that carries further potential for meaning and is not limited to surface.

The artist’s practice is essentially spiritual, emotional and intuitive. Through the work, there is a tendency to depersonalize and universalize the personal to extend the potential for meaning. Activity is not driven by a quest for self-exploration or awareness. There are no conceits here, instead O’Donoghue is realistic, he wishes instead to impart information to viewers through the tradition of painting. This information is relative rather than predetermined and this is its value. This is best articulated by O’Donoghue himself: ‘I have never believed that artists wholly control the meaning of their work. Meaning accrues, it is the product of what is invested in the work.’2 Therefore one cannot prescribe the effect of the creative endeavour as efforts to do so rob painting of its intensity.

‘The Passion’ series and ‘Studies for a Crucifixion’ exemplify this power of intensity that O’Donoghue’s prolonged thematic focus commands. This work was described by the late Dorothy Walker as ‘enormous, apocalyptic canvases and charcoal drawings…almost a return to the Abstract Expressionism of the fifties in their heroic scale and intention.’3 These works assume a solemnity in the artist’s subdued palette and monochromic carborundum prints, that reflects the tragedy. Conceived on a massive scale as extensive as over six metres, this series assumes an iconic aspect with this status further emphasized by the diptych and triptych format. The semi-abstract nature of the series leaves space for the viewer’s imagination to construct relative meanings and enables the longevity of the work.

The artist’s current practice builds further on this potential but the focus has shifted to another major historical event, the World War II. The Imperial War Museum exhibition ‘Painting Caserta Red’4 serves to enlighten the complexity of the artist’s approach. There are multiple layers of meaning in this exhibition. It consists of two main sections, one in landscape format, concerned with the retreat in France in 1940, the second features the human figure, and details the advance in Italy in 1944, specifically attempts to cross the Rapido River during the Battle of Monte Cassino. Paintings that feature the figure are life-size or larger to allow for greater interaction between viewer and work. The uncertainty of historical accuracy is convoluted further by the artist’s references to classical sculpture and parallels in mythology. The paintings carry references to numerous stated sources to illustrate man’s inability to learn from history of the violence of war and surviving visual testaments to torture and suffering. The title ‘Painting Caserta Red’ is important on a variety of levels. It sounds like an artist’s pigment, referencing the painting process. It also directly relates to a letter from the artist’s father to his mother that described the American GI’s celebrating the end of the war at Caserta and finally ‘painting the town red also has more sinister overtones in the context of the brutal fighting that took place in the last months of the war in Italy’5

‘History and painting have the same goal; both try to represent the truth. However, neither do it very often. Both are ultimately subjective. The messages of history come through in an intermittent way like smoke signals that require the key of the imagination to unlock their story.’6 O’Donoghue realizes that he cannot present ‘the truth’ of the World War II. His father’s wartime experience, articulated through an epistolary narrative to his mother, can only be interpreted and illustrated ‘through a glass darkly’ by the artist. O’Donoghue is the first to admit that this is not an effort at self-analysis through interpretation of familial experience. Instead he is communicating an intentionally dislocated narrative from a distance and it is a story of ‘the obscured individual’ rather than his father. He assumes no pretensions of achieving factual accuracy with the paintings. Any truths that are offered are merely serendipitous. One can draw an analogy with Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, viewed as the first modernist novel of the 20th century. It is impossible to provide anything more than obscurity when endeavouring to explore documents of barbarism: colonialism and war.

Each painting appears to potentially offer a framed narrative, a piece in the puzzle that will relate to the next piece and provide a picture of wartime experience. Instead we have a series of Chinese boxes, seeming to afford illumination but there can never be an absolute truth. The only apparent exception is ‘Anabasis’ which provides a more plenary insight. Comprised of 24 separate paintings each presented in open book format, these detail snippets of his father’s journey, which began and ended in Manchester, providing dislocated elements of narrative highlighting the diversity of experience from the mundane to the exceptional. This work, the most complete illustration of the artist’s preoccupation of the past seven years, is still incomplete as a narrative. Such an experience cannot be explained in twenty-four paintings, although it fulfils artistic intention in providing a window on a journey obscured by history and time. T S Eliot, in Four Quartets, explains the impossibility of articulating the experience of war:

There is, it seems to us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been.7

Eliot defined his work with artistic adjectives; mosaic, collage and pastiche. The Waste Land and Four Quartets are literary mosaics with a layered format, which is full of repetition and allusion. The works in ‘Painting Caserta Red’ are composites of books, mixed media, oil paint and photographic elements collaged together. The complexity of construction of the paintings reflects difficulty of thematic articulation. Indeed for both Eliot and O’Donoghue, allusion is the unifying factor that holds the collage together. Both show their sources in myth and history explicitly (through titles or allusion) and this acts as the skeleton of their work. The final section of The Waste Land, ‘The Burial of the Dead’ crystallises all that went before and sends us back to the beginning (as in ‘Anabasis’ with the journey from and to Manchester). There is a cyclical rather than a linear time frame which reflects human experience.

This year is particularly productive for the artist. He has just completed an exhibition ‘Richer Dust’ at the Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery. The month of June will challenge O’Donoghue’s peripatetic potential. The Imperial War Museum, London is hosting a major exhibition of the artist’s recent work which is coupled with a concurrent show at the Rubicon Gallery, Dublin (June 10-28). In acknowledgement of the artist’s status and contribution, Merrell are publishing a much anticipated book, entitled Hughie O’Donoghue: Painting, Memory, Myth. To complete the month and litany of events, the RHA are presenting a talk by O’Donoghue in the gallery on June 26th (6.30p.m.), which promises to offer insight into the depth of the artist’s current practice.

Marianne O’Kane is curator of the Cavanacor Gallery, Lifford Co. Donegal

1 Interview with the artist 9 May 2003.
2 Catalogue Introduction. Hughie O’Donoghue: Smoke Signals. London: Purdy Hicks Gallery, 2000.
3 Dorothy Walker. Modern Art in Ireland. p.151. Chapter 6: The Life of Painting. Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1997.
4 This thematic intricacies of this exhibition, in terms of the World War II, mythology and art historical precedent are explored fully in the Merrell publication on the artist’s work. Hughie O’Donoghue: Painting, Memory, Myth.
5 Interview with the artist 9 May 2003.
6 Catalogue Introduction. Hughie O’Donoghue: Smoke Signals. London: Purdy Hicks Gallery, 2000.
7 T S Eliot. Four Quartets : East Coker. Verse II. p.26. London: Faber & Faber.