Brian McAvera: Eamon, your father was the well-known artist Seamus O'Colmain, who was part of a group of artists that you grew up with – people like Arthur Armstrong, George Campbell, Gerry Dillon and Nano Reid. How difficult was it to become an artist when you were growing up in the shadow of your father? How would you describe the linkages and differences, in terms of art, between the two of you? And did that primarily Northern group of artists (you also having a Northern grandfather) have any noticeable influence on you!
Eamon Colman: Two things happened very closely. One was that my youthful creative energy turned to gardening and landscape architecture. I wanted to design gardens and be involved with garden architecture but the reality was that I found it too client-based. There was no room for me to let my imagination go, so I started to make drawings again. Looking back, it was probably inevitable, as I was growing up within that particular milieu of contemporary Irish art. They were probably the only artists in the country who were 'avant-garde' and looking to recent European art.
I remember George Dillon coming to Malahide Road, where I grew up. I was very young, but that earnest enthusiasm of the child with folded arms was there. My father showed with the Hendrix Gallery on St Stephen's Green. I had built up a nephew-like relationship with David Hendrix. I'd go in every Thursday afternoon, after school, to the gallery, and we'd have a discussion about the current show. All of that had a huge influence on the type of painting I enjoyed.
I think Gerry Dillon probably had a bigger influence on me than George Campbell, though I knew George for longer. The sand paintings of Gerry's (after his 'Clown' series) due to their tonal abstraction – got me looking at academic painting in a different way. I started looking at surface. Gerry Dillon encouraged me to look at British art, such as that of Terry Frost, Heron, and Hitchens who was one of the big discoveries for me. I even went over to London to search him out. He was showing at the Redfern Gallery and I was completely bowled over by the apocalyptic destruction within his landscapes. He created this atmosphere by dividing his painting into three, four or five sections. This in turn enabled the paintings to have a narrative. This narrative was particular to the development of British post-War landscape. Elements of the foreground would be pushed into the background and vice versa.
In that way, yes that group of Northern artists would have really influenced me, but the difference for me occurred when I started to discover purely contemporary landscape painting: Se‡n McSweeney, Barrie Cooke and so on. I remember the Hendrix gallery showing Cooke's 'Borneo' paintings. They were about the way I saw the landscape. It was almost as if I were being given permission to draw and paint the way I wanted to. By the time I was really painting however, I was in my twenties. As a kid, drawing was the one area where my father Seamus and myself really communicated. He would set up a little still-life, we would both draw it, and then we would have a discussion about it. He always wanted to treat me as an adult; it was his way of blooding me! His biggest influence on me was to bring me to the galleries and to expose me to art books and literature. As a young child my father gave me a Christmas present of Homer's Iliad. In disapointment I threw it back at him thinking that it was an inappropriate present for a child – but all of that stuck, and literature has become a huge influence on my painting.
B McA: I suppose most people think of landscape as the quintessential Irish genre, yet the term 'landscape' doesn't even rate a mention in many contemporary dictionaries of art. Most of your work, although far from topography, is landscape-based, so, as someone who has written about landscape as well as painted it, how do you view the genre, and how flexible do you think it is today?
E C: For me, landscape painting is the starting point of an exploration of both a personal and a historical response to place. In my recent body of work there was a series of paintings called Between Memory and a Sagging Wall (Fig 6) The main painting was trying to come to terms with the influence of the famine on the area around me in Kilkenny and, if you like, the continuation of that 'famine' right up to the foundation of the State – bad economic planning continued right up until Lemass. Paint, for me, is the only way to deal with this historical influence of a place. I find that when I look at a cottage in a landscape, the contradiction is between how romantic it is – and the reality that it has. I've just been reading an incredible book on the 1950s in Ireland. In 1957, when I was born, half a million people had already left Ireland. There are two things that I'm curious about: the horror of having to leave your country; and the lovely stories about the community giving their sod of burning turf to the one who was to stay behind to literally keep the home fires burning. This poor guy gradually notices that the houses are degrading but he's not able to do anything. Slowly but surely the landscape takes over the houses again.
If I think about those influences, in conjunction with landscape painting, the responsibility of the painter is to show that contradiction: the marks that take place as a result of events. In the contemporary sense I look at German Expressionists, even at the later paintings of American Expressionist Robert Motherwell, which were to me very much floating landscapes, influenced by New England and the West Coast of America. I suppose for me it's linked to gardening in that I'm an outdoor person. I love digging my flowerbeds and my vegetable patch. I love walking, trying to understand how I respond to the landscape rather than to a picture postcard.
If I go back to how I begin a painting, having walked or spent a period in a landscape with my notebook, it's a moment in time as with And Now a Feather Gently Falls (Fig 5). That moment in time captures the landscape rather than the surface. When I come back to the studio I load the brush, say with yellow, and make a mark on the canvas. Then I sit there for hours trying to see how that affects the space in the canvas - and then I respond to that. So in that sense, landscape is something sub-conscious. I want to feel that a painting has a structure; I'm not allowing the landscape to control my mark-making or me. That's where the process of understanding comes from: the struggle to say something about a place without referring to the obvious in a landscape. So symbols come into the work as a way of articulating my relationship to the landscape. If you look at the personal history of my work, the symbols started to come to the forefront when I was in India. I found myself in a landscape, among a people whose history and way of living was so totally alien to me that the only way I could deal with it was to use symbols to educate myself.
B McA: You are primarily a painter in oil on canvas. Tell us about your working methods and of the relationship between drawing and painting.
E C: Mark making has always been important to me. From the beginning I have always used notebooks as a way of remembering a place. In the beginning I drew what was in front of me. But this academic approach had severe limitations so I started to include text to anchor my response, not unlike a diary. As part of this learning process I started working out of doors making linear drawings and over time I began using colour directly. I also experimented with the relationship between drawing and colour looking at incidental colours within a landscape. During the early 1980s I worked on paper mainly as it was more sympathetic to my processes of layering. The ritual of preparing the paper was an integral part of the process. The change from paper to canvas coincided with my first extended trip to America in the early 1990s. During that time I worked within the parameters of large paper-notebooks (Fig 10). Recording these experiences was sometimes frenzied, and was sometimes constrained by the weather, wildlife and the journey itself (as I white-water rafted down the three largest rivers of America). When I returned to Ireland I felt a need to slow the process down by making my own canvas stretchers.
B McA: You're not an abstract artist in the sense that your sole concerns are not simply colour, form, design and spatial organisation, but you do operate in a highly abstracting mode. Can you tell us about your attitude to abstract art, and what you take from it?
E C: When I visit museums, I find myself more drawn towards pure minimalist work. What I think I get from pure abstraction is balance. I visited the Municipal Gallery in Dublin a few weeks before Christmas and saw the Philip Guston painting - an extraordinary painting. By and large he only used two colours and created a very flat surface, but the placement within the picture plane is magnificent. Behind it are the two small works by Ciaran Lennon – the finest paintings that I've seen in Ireland of late. They were just stunning because of the combination between space, placement and colour, between balance, shape and form. Here is an artist whom you know has struggled to get the correct balance. When I, as an artist, talk about any work, the main struggle is the balance between shape, form and colour, and although I'm known as a colourist, it's the combination of the three that have to work in harmony, otherwise it is imbalanced.
I don't know if pure abstraction exists: it's a response to something, a circle. For me, the reason why I would use abstraction in a painting but never go the whole hog, is that pure abstraction is a pure response – a learnt one. I'm still getting to know my subject matter so that I am able to push it to the ninth degree. You cannot abstract something until you know what it is that you are abstracting! Rothko's black paintings are the nearest equivalent that we have to the old masters. There is a personal, strange narrative running through them. It's about creating a sense of stillness in a painting. They're purely about feeling.
BMcA: 'Content' is often a word which is used pejoratively, but you are an artist for whom elements of narrative, myth and symbolism (both Freudian and Jungian) constantly surface, though not in any literary, programmatic manner. Is that fair comment?
E C: Yes. [A long, long pause]. I think in my heart that I am probably a storyteller. For me each painting is about trying to decipher the narrative response that goes on inside my head to a place. When you talk about narrative in the paintings, for me it is not just about the relationship I'm having with the landscape, but the relationship that the landscape has had with itself, and the people who live in it. I limit my subject matter. I've noticed of late that I always have a fairly high horizon line. It's a way of me saying to myself that when you approach a naked canvas, similar to the limitations of a short story, you are immediately working within a framework. Recently I've been painting smallish canvases and the challenge is that within that small framework (you've made the stretcher) there are constraints (Figs 4, 7&9). You put on another constraint, the first marks, a tonal change either side of a line – how do you make the canvas move? How do you make it have life, now you have perhaps five constraining lines!
Putting constraints on myself: then having to overcome them. When a painting is going wrong, that's the time to go mad and push the boundaries. That's what happened with Gypsy Moth (Fig 1). I usually sit in the studio, rooting myself to the spot. Then I put out a whole array of colours and spend the whole day mixing, trying to get a green that has the right luminosity. I'd had one of those mixing days and decided to attack this canvas which wasn't working. I left it for months, then starting painting a gypsy moth. I had been making drawings of it. Then one afternoon I just stepped up to the canvas and drew the moth shape in white on green, and instantly I had my painting. It was as if I only knew how to paint what I was trying to say, at that particular moment, but it had taken me months of being there, of drawing, to achieve the finished work.
B McA: Like Dermot Seymour, you have a flair for evocative titles; are the titles part of your interest in literature, or do you see them as accurately reflecting the content of a given work?
E C: I suppose both! The reason I use elaborate titles is, on the one hand, to obscure the thought process that went into the making of paintings that are usually very personal (the symbols all have meaning), so I obscure, but because they are in a netherworld between abstract and landscape, I hope it gives the viewer a way into developing a relationship with the painting.
In my studio I painted one of the doors with blackboard paint. I have a stick of chalk, and, as I'm working on a painting, things pop into my head or I hear them on the radio and I write them onto the door, and out of that comes the titles for the paintings. I read a lot of poetry and I find the Irish voice in poetry has an unique element in the poets that I like: it's the use of words, the colour, the atmosphere of place – even when they use place-names, it's in a particular way – not just in terms of placement but in terms of evoking atmosphere. I'm trying to do the same with a title. It's as if to say 'here's what actually started the process'. In the 1998 RHA retrospective, Spoonbill Morning (Fig 3) was precisely that: a morning in which I saw a spoonbill bird and I painted it. I became totally excited, was stopped in my tracks, by something that stimulates my imagination into making a visual response. Titling is a very important aspect of the painting process.
B McA: Travel seems essential to your work. You've spent periods in Eastern and Central Europe, the former USSR, North America, and most recently in South Africa, yet you never produce topographical sketches or 'straight' landscape paintings. So what kinds of journeys are happening in your mind and in your art?
E C: Travel for me is about experiencing the other. The whole idea for me stems from the need to walk, so when I set out, for example, to walk to the source of the Ganges, it is about conquering the fear that one has of the unknown – sleeping out at night in a foreign land is not necessarily a relaxing pursuit – but because I always travel away from the tourist route, I get to meet people and to experience their way of life. This, for me, has always been about opening up my imagination, listening to the folk stories, observing a different way of farming – all of this interweaves with how I respond to a place. I take myself, with my western views, go to a place, and try to discover the humanity – the connection between the two cultures.
There was a series of paintings that came from the South African trip, entitled 'Grandfather Trees'. The idea came after meeting a man who brought me to a grove of trees where he talked about his ancestors dying and being buried there and the trees were being treated as their living spirits. That tied in with the philosophy I have that the earth is a living being like you and I, it has the same moods and feelings – not in a romantic but in a realistic way. It's an organism that breathes and communicates.
B McA: There are some artists for whom biographical information is almost irrelevant, and some – like Picasso – whose art is effectively one long autobiography. How do you see yourself in relation to your art?
E C: There's no doubt about it that, for me, painting is about my way of dealing with my passage through the world. In a very naive kind of way I sometimes feel as if my response isn't real until it's been painted.
Painting is my real truth. I never forget a painting so I can relive the place and the atmosphere, through the paintings. So in that sense my paintings are my personal diary. I made a decision very early on not to include the human figure in my work. Very rarely would I include a face or a figure. This is because I believe that my job is to try and find the trueness of nature, or the truth behind man's manipulation of nature. When I look at landscapes I see the field patterns, or the planting of trees created by a farming or gardening trail, and I try to see beyond that: how is this affecting the natural world? So I would not be painting what is there in front of me, but what I feel is there in front of me. That is compounded by my method of painting – making marks on the canvas and pushing it to where it becomes a cross between abstraction and landscape painting.
B McA: While you are clearly an Irish artist, one's automatic instinct is to frame you within a European tradition. How do you see yourself?
E C: I suppose I'm reluctant to see myself in any arena. I'm a passionate looker at art. I go and seek out art, not necessarily the mainstream. By and large the likes of Picasso and the Surrealist artists have become icons of capitalism because of the media, and so their visual response is diminished somewhat. I think that one of the problems with painting is that it has become categorised by its different styles. For me the only way I can be an artist is if I paint what is true to me. If that is influenced by European or American painting, so be it. What I would hope to achieve is a manipulation of that language which is true to me.
I always find it very difficult when I go into museums or major collections and see one type of art in one room. For me all good painting has its moment. It shouldn't be about boxing it into categories. I see myself as an artist who just happens to be living in Ireland rather than an Irish artist. I've had this argument with artist friends about provincialism versus internationalism. I believe that all true art comes from what you know, rather than that from what you see and think you know. That's why I'm a landscape painter. If you were to be wide-eyed in Ireland, the thing that affects you most is the landscape. I think that it boils down to what it is that stimulates the 'you' in the person.
Brian McAvera is an art critic.
All Images ©The Artist.