Melita Denaro is a painter of mixed antecedents and a disparate background and upbringing, whose style nevertheless is at once recognisable. She is of mixed Maltese and Irish blood – her Christian name, presumably, derives from the island on which St Paul was cast in a storm (see 'Acts of the Apostles') and which is often claimed to have been Malta, though scholars seem to disagree on that. She was born in 1950 at Burt, Co Donegal, at the foot of the mountains she has often painted, but her art education was in London and she began as a ceramicist, switching later to painting. Her ceramics I have never seen, nor do I know of any exhibitions of them. Her studies at the Royal Academy Schools began when she was past forty, ending with a postgraduate diploma in painting. We know her work mostly from recent showings at the Taylor Galleries in Dublin, though she has also exhibited at the Solomon Gallery and at the Glebe Gallery in Donegal. In London, she has been seen regularly at the John Martin Gallery which has been a virtual ambassador for Irish art in Britain. For some years not a great deal of notice was taken of her – she looked a good, solid, middle-of-the-road painter with a vigorous sense of paint, an eye for locale and a rather limited range of subject. Recently, however, collectors and the gallery-going public have begun to realise that there is more to her than that. She has kept a studio in London, yet every year she makes the journey to the Inishowen Peninsula in her native Donegal, and out to the island of Doagh.

 
Her family has kept a cottage there and she works mainly from a field by the sea's edge. She paints, apparently, in almost all weathers and her paintings are mainly direct responses to weather, skies, pastures and the sea (Figs 3 &4). There is, however, another very potent factor involved – that of memory. This came through vividly in the exhibition of three years ago called 'A field we knew together' which was rich with nostalgia and local references. The picture titles speak for themselves: Missing Hughie along the road, Vincent the Curate's Evening, Talking to Rose and Danny- Force Eight Gale. These paintings, then, are full of personal associations and recollections, yet in spite of the many people named, none of them (or none that I have seen) include the human figure. Cattle make a regular appearance (Fig 2) and so, occasionally, do sheep, as well as huddled farmhouses and outbuildings. Otherwise these are more or less un-peopled landscapes, though the human presence and human activity are always implicit in them (Fig 1). They are not fashionable evocations of 'unspoilt' loneliness, though the presence of the Atlantic can usually be either seen or felt (one of her paintings is half-jokingly entitled Towards New York from Carrigabracky). Melita Denaro, then, is almost entirely a landscape artist. But she is not a descriptive or cosily traditional one, in spite of the homely intimacy she often gives to her titles. She has something in common with the late, great Norman Adams in that she keeps one foot on the ground while reaching out into something vaster and more elemental. And like him, she combines a Constable-like feeling for local landscape character with a Turner-like thrust into semi-abstract areas. Her forms, too, often resemble Turner's in their sense of a vortex around which vital forces revolve, usually those of nature (an exception to this are the striking impressions – virtually abstract pictures – she painted of the Himalayas while on a visit to Nepal about six years ago). She paints usually on board, in a rather small format, and her bigger pictures are, as a whole, less concentrated and effective than her smaller ones. She is an excellent technician, with a touch alternately capable of registering broad, sweeping effects, and tiny cattle in a field under great overhanging skies.

This is not innovative art, but it is not timid or conventional either; a strong personality vibrates through it, and there is an emotional authenticity and directness which are, alas, only too rare in today's gimmick-ridden art scene. And in painting the Atlantic seaboard she is, of course, aligning herself with contemporary artists such as Seán McSweeeney, Barrie Cooke and Charles Tyrrell, who, in their contrasting ways, have shown that there is still much to be painted outside the urban belt.

Brian Fallon is an art critic.
All images ©The Artist.
Melita Denaro, Upon the Glad Earth, John Martin Gallery, London,
14 May – 7 June 2008

Captions:
1 Melita Denaro b.1950 Bernard's corn stooks, ewes and Pat and Martina's homeplace 2007 oil on board 34.29 x 38.1cm

2 Upon the Glad Earth 2007 oil on board 19 x 24.13cm

3 Apricot Moon, a fold of ewes and wishing Hughie there 2007 oil on board 11 x 16.51cm

4 Quartering the Ground and staying close by me all evening, September 2006
2007 oil on board 15.24 x 19.5cm