“I look at landscape and wonder what lives in it,” landscapist and committed environmentalist Jim Manley tells Brian McAvera ahead of his exhibition at the Tom Caldwell Gallery, Belfast
Brian McAvera: Landscape is very much the Manley subject and has been from the start of your career, but you are a very different kind of landscape artist from the usual Irish variety. You are a mountaineer and environmentalist out in the landscape with a Cézanne-like doggedness, and though not blind to the beauty of a sunset or a gorse bush flaring into blossom, there is a hard-nosed realism about much of your work. How do you see yourself?
Jim Manley: I look at landscape and wonder what lives in it. If it’s muddy I see the worms under the mud and the bird that will feed on them. If there’s a gorse bush I wonder would a bird find a place to nest in it. With a field I look to see if there’s a hare in it, and increasingly, lately, I’m disappointed.
The people I paint are the people who depend on it – Mad Sweeney living on cresses and nuts, or people hiding in the landscape like Redmond O’Hanlon (Fig 1) or Thomas Russell (one of the founders of the United Irishmen) or those that I did of St Brigid, gathering food along the shore [Manley calls her Bridget]. They are the kind of people who blend into the landscape rather than confront it (Fig 7).
Janet Mullarney’s sculptures perform as metaphors, not portraits, writes Cliodhna Shaffrey