Stephen Lawlor By Brian McAvera
The imagination catches fire at both the actuality and the symbolism of a copper seam submerging beneath the Irish Sea, then re-emerging at one end, in Anglesey in North Wales, and at the other end in Avoca, Co Wicklow, in the Republic of Ireland. The symbolism and the continuities of tradition, heritage and history, continue as one realises that these now disused, open-cast mines would seem to be the perfect symbols of both our vanished history, and of a Celtic connection.
So what does Lawlor do? Does he fit within any definable British or Irish context as a painter? Is the work more European or American in inspiration? What is his relationship to photography? As a printmaker of long-standing should he be placed within the category that art historians call Painter-Etchers? Is he in any sense a landscape painter, or even a topographical artist? Is he an abstract artist in disguise, or is he somewhere on that sliding scale of abstracted work which starts with Impressionism and which is still current today, in all visual art-forms, in what Georges Bataille, as filtered through Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss, have called L'informe.
Let's look at his history first. In the early eighties, fresh from college, he started to make prints, often basing them on vignettes taken from Old Master paintings. By zeroing in on Old Master details, he combined a post Pop Art sensibility with the pleasure-principle of pictorial design. Etchings like Coast, Road to the Sea or Horizon could be viewed in the surrealist sense of the detail standing in for the whole, but they fitted in rather better with that kind of conceptual sensibility which appropriated from a source and then reinterpreted it in terms of colour, mark-making and design.
As both painter and printmaker, Lawlor seemed to be drawn to particular themes such as The Crucifixion, The Annunciation, the Landscape and - in another zeroing in - the Horse. Sources, whether singular or composite, provide him with a rough template: a starting point for jump-leading the imagination. The same will be true of his paintings, only here the source will be a digital photograph; and instead of using composites, he will prefer to select a single image - though with digital technology he will be able to activate the idea of a composite by zeroing in (that word again) onto a detail, and changing its status by magnification which - sooner or later - results in abstraction.
As the emphasis upon the horse might indicate this is a pantheistic temperament - as opposed, for example, to the specifically religious and catholic temperament of a painter and printmaker like Patrick Pye- and one which transforms the raw data of source material into a mnemonic of a Third Space: a dreamworld, or a staged encounter.
In his printmaking painterly concerns were soon in operation, in terms of spit-biting and the manipulation of plate tone. A skim of plate tone might be graduated across an area of sky while other areas would be aquatinted by spit-biting. Where the acid, when applied by the brush, encountered water, soft edges would be created on the equipoise between darkness and light; between the deeply dense aquatints and the light areas of plate tone.
His use of three or four plates for any given print, so allowing for a layering of colours is analogous to his painting wet-in-wet, except that in the paintings the layering of paint is more overtly interactive as opposed to the more controlled and calibrated optical mix of the prints. This painterly attack came to a head when he started to produce monoprints in 1997 in which the paint was, literally, brushed on.
If we shift forward in time to the current exhibition Cu (the chemical symbol for copper) what are we being presented with, and how were these works generated? We know that previous to this series of works the artist had spent seven or eight months in a Swedish forest which resulted in the exhibition Hinterland. Those paintings were essentially Impressionist works in that they expressed the artist's personality and response to the world.
The archetypal impressionist subject is landscape and its artists were encouraged by, and used, photography as well as being fascinated by new research into colour and light. Lawlor's subjects in painting have likewise tended to be landscapes. He uses a digital photograph on the screen, and thus imbued with light, as his sketchpad reference, and the impact of light on water or forest trees as with Lake 11 or Vertical, is clearly of central importance to him.
The exhibition which immediately preceded the Swedish one, which had three of Dublin's rivers (the Tolka, Liffey and Dodder) as its nominal subject matter, exhibited the same concerns. In Tolka 2 for example, broad taches of white depicted the flickering of light as it skited across water. Both of these exhibitions were landscape-based, though the emphasis for the most part was on the natural environment. In the current exhibition we observe the effects of the encroachment of man upon the landscape in both Anglesey and Wicklow. These are man-made landscapes but not ones which are consciously designed. The spoil heaps, the end result of rock which has been pulverised, roasted and dumped, over the years create an unnatural landscape of colour as the metals in the rock oxidise. There is randomness to this process (and indeed also, to a degree, in terms of the scars left by open-cast mining) which is very different from the more controlled world of a planted forest or an urban river.
If one thinks of Asphalt Rundown (1969), by the American artist Robert Smithson, which consists of a series of photographs of a lorry, tipping a load of liquid asphalt down a mountain scree, some connections can be made. By pouring asphalt down the mountainside Smithson is at once acknowledging the random weathering of a quarried landscape while at the same time attempting to put a shape upon it by mimicking the random nature of what had been left. It is precisely this pull between randomness and the artist's urge to impose some form or shape (no matter how loose) that Bois & Krauss characterise as L'informe or 'formless'.
Lawlor's response, like Smithson's, is a controlled slippage between the imposition of form, and the urge to explore what is an actually abstracted landscape. He has learnt from the camera's unthinking ability to squash space and to create dramatic foreshortenings. This trope (a staple of modernism from Gauguin onwards) emerges in the way in which he flattens the perspective to the point where the painting can be read as an 'allover' image, whilst at the same time allowing a limited, recessionist reading.
Fundamentally these are paintings about ambiguity: what is it that we are actually seeing? How do we 'read' an image? Initially, when the present writer first saw the paintings as images on a disc, they looked like seascapes: waves crashing against the shoreline, somewhat in the manner of the Irish painter Donald Teskey. The images had the swirl and skirl of strong, visceral movement.
But ironically, in real life, screes and spoil heaps, especially large ones, do suggest latent movement. A scree, of its nature, has a diagonal thrust, and when made of small pebbles, is easily set in motion. Large spoil heaps create the same kind of kinetic sensation: one imagines that to pull out a pebble would set off a landslide. This latent kinetic energy is made patent in Lawlor's paintings.
Lawlor clearly abstracts. He is not interested in a description of piles of scree for example, but rather in an evocation of the scene. The paint is allowed to wander and drift, and a sense of movement is built into his working methods as he will frequently have three or four loaded brushes in one hand, and switch rapidly between them. The drag and pull and twist of long bristle brushes condense this sense of movement into swirling brushstrokes which enervate the picture plane.
This sense of condensation is paramount. The original manmade landscapes are vast and one might have expected the painter to opt, like so many American and European expressionists, for sheer scale. Yet these paintings are tiny. The immensities of rock face, scree and the quarried scars, are taken to task, reduced, simplified, made to behave within the confines of the small canvas. Paradoxically, by emphasising the allover surface, man's inruptions into the earth's tissue are levelled out.
Condensation however, also has other effects. It heightens the immediacy, emphasises the sense of movement, and so creates a drama, almost a melodrama, which is reminiscent of the effects achieved by a Gericault or a Delacroix. One can observe this in a work like Iron Hat, Avoca No.5 which is constructed (like many of these paintings) upon a quite firm, indeed aggressive diagonal, which runs from bottom left to up right. The swirling paint suggests a maelstrom: an anger and a brooding sense of incipient violence as if the scree were sea waves breaking upon the shore or pouring down a waterfall.
This brio of brush marks would drive the eyes to skitter off the edges of the painting if not only the diagonal, but also the area to the upper left (which registers as black but is technically a thick 'Van Dyck' brown), did not anchor the painting. With paintings like these a sense of architectural underscoring is necessary. Lawlor favours diagonals but also, quite frequently, he nails down a composition by the use of a small spot or tache of dark paint as in the mid right of Iron Hat Avoca Number Four. Occasionally this is reversed as in Iron Hat Avoca No. 8 where the anchoring is daintily done by a pinky rose area on the centre right.
What most of these paintings do is to replicate the sense of the eye flicking backwards and forwards, upwards and downwards, as one walks across a landscape, while registering unexpected hues. In other words the sense of being in the landscape, the sense of being the artist as he moves across it, is muscularly reproduced in the paint. It is tempting to call the painter an expressionist but this is really not a very useful term in relation to him. The use of broad brushstrokes, tactile surfaces, and allover compositions can be observed in the School of London (Auerbach, Kossof et al), in the School of Paris (think of everyone from Soutine through to Dubuffet, Poliakoff and Soulages) or in the American Expressionists (from Pollock to Philip Guston), and all three groups have left thumbprints upon Lawlor's work, but the crucial distinction is scale.
All expressionist painting and particularly the American variety is vulnerable, as Robert Hughes noted, to an overt grandiloquence and pretentiousness which confuses size with scale. What is striking about Lawlor, and is perhaps a product of his earlier immersion in the print world, is the sense of containment and control in an arena which normally indicates the opposite.
This small scale containment is all the more striking when one thinks of a painter like Auerbach whose earlier work, specifically the London Building Sites 1952-62 series is close to Lawlor's current work, in terms not only of subject matter - both are large-scale encroachments by man into the land - but also in terms of its earth colour palette offset by striking patches of warmer colours. The majority of Auerbach's Building Site paintings are large-scale whereas all of Lawler's are small-scale.
In a painting like Amlwch, Anglesey, No.5 for instance, constructed like so many of Auerbach's, of thick, dense brushstrokes, and like many of that artist's Building Site works capable of being read as both a flat, cauled, abstracted and frontal surface, and as recessive landscape, the difference is that Lawlor's painting, unlike Auerbach's is not only small but also contains the latent energy of movement.
So, to answer the questions posed earlier, as to what kind of painter the artist is, it seems clear that he is neither a narrowly 'Irish' painter, solely concerned with a parochial exploration of landscape and its Irish identity, nor is he a topographical painter in any real sense. Rather he is a European artist (albeit happy to pillage any useful American painter) with a distinct tachiste imprint, and a sensibility which combines his printmaker's flare for subtle colour and small-scale with an animated surface flecked with light.
Brian McAvera is a playwright, curator, art historian and art critic.
Dr. Aidan Doyle Cat. Essay Cu 2009
The Celestial Vault By Dr. Aidan Doyle
The Wicklow Mountains bear few traces of the natural world other than as it has been ameliorated through human agency. What we see in Glendalough, for instance, is a landscape made by the hands of men and women. Geology records the natural processes of attenuation that take place over aeons, and is written down in a language which describes temporal zones spanning hundreds of millions of years. Volcanological deposits have made the Avoca valleys the focus of mining for at least four thousand years. Mineralisation there is largely the result of volcanic activities which occurred millions of years ago.
Metal ores have been deposited in massive sulphides formed by the exhalation of volcanoes on the seabed. This activity is studied as it occurs today as hydrothermal vents formed when superheated water from beneath the earth's crust bursts through the ocean floor. The water is rich with dissolved minerals and these precipitate when they meet cold water and become massive sulphide ore deposits. At Avoca, and its sister lode at Amlwch in North Wales the major ore minerals in the deposits are chalcopyrite, sphalerite and galena, providing copper, zinc and lead respectively. Minor minerals such as arsenopyrite or mispickel, (along with orpiment is an important ore of arsenic - and can be an indicator of the presence of gold), tetrahedrite (copper antimony sulphide) and bismuthinite (a sulphide ore of bismuth), as well as some gold and silver, are also present. Most of the metal bearing rock here is composed of pyrite.
The word Gossan is used to describe oxidised and weathered rock, usually the upper and exposed part of an ore deposit or mineral vein. Gossans have been important indicators of buried ore. Prospectors use these clues to speculate as to the type of mineralization likely to be found below an iron cap.
"morja ter nebesnega oboa" - sea and the celestial vault
It is certain that gold, silver and copper mines were worked in this area from the remotest antiquity. It is also known that gold was obtained here in much greater abundance in ancient times. Gaelic, Old Norse, Anglicised Gaelic and English are likewise temporal markers of place. Ptolemy mapped the world in 150 AD identifying the location of the river 'Oboka': in fact, the oldest place name in Ireland which comes down to us from the Scythian languages by way of Hittite metal miners who came here first before histories were written down. The closest parallel we have is the modern Slovenian language where 'oboka' means an arch - the celestial vault or rainbow- and the Avoca was named for the celestial arch by people who knew of the treasures secreted in its valleys - and how to get them and what to do with them. Hittites established their kingdom in central Anatolia through most of the second millennium BC. These were the first civilization known to have worked in iron. Excavations of their cities record a people with distinct engineering mining and metallurgic skills. Resource procurement remained vital to Hittite supremacy and the command and priority of rights over these resources. They knew how to read the landscape and the gossan lode. Such resources abound in the Avoca river catchment.
The earliest workings of which traces can be detected were for lead in Cronebane, and iron in Moneyteigue. And "... at the Magpie or East Cronebane (Ovoca), there are 'old men's workings' on the 'gossan lode', and in them were found stone and wooden implements. Ruins of very ancient iron workings and mines are recorded between Aughrim and Ballynaclash.
Economically useful minerals were listed by Kinahan in an exhaustive volume in 1889. He noted that the "Great Mineral Channel extends from near the sea southwards of Wicklow, in a south-west direction, to Ovoca, and from that to the flanks of Croghan-Kinshella, a distance of about fifteen miles. In the channel and adjoining it the rocks are 'iron-masked', similar to the rocks adjoining to the intrude of the younger Granite". It is linked to the igneous activity which accompanied intrusion of the younger granites, and is evident in the orebody at Amlwch, Anglesey. As these have been worked across time they offer insights into histories that have been written on and concealed within the landscape.
Through drainage from the deep and ancient mines four thousand years of human activities have caused the lower Avoca to be the most polluted river in Ireland. The scenery of the mine sites is subject of judgmental bias. The general idea of taste relates to a person's ability to render approbation to a given situation. Aesthetic verdicts differ from factual judgments by which we understand things to be either true or false. The same cannot be said about conclusions drawn from the operations of taste where sentiment determines that a particular object is or is not beautiful. Kant's 'Standards of Taste' determine how aesthetic appreciation is derived from habituated expectations based on custom and association. We know what we like and we like what we know. Alternatively cognitive positions in environmental aesthetics promote the idea that the understanding of the nature of the object of comprehension (its narrative - its history and meaning) is important to aesthetic appreciation of it. A positive appreciation of a place may confront the accepted stereotype; and this is never more so than in rural Ireland. The scenery afforded by the Avoca and Amlwch mine sites is the subject of significant judgmental bias. We are familiar with the idyll of the Irish landscape, the pictorial tradition underpinned by romantic recollections articulated around bucolic imagery: the stuff of the calendar and picture book. Abandoned mines paint a totally different picture. Looking without prejudice at a differentiated landscape can be effected through an Aesthetic Realism approach, by which we agree that the purpose of study is to like the world through knowledge of it.
Despite European conventions which should serve to protect this exposed geological heritage the Avoca mines are a threatened landscape.
Dr.Aidan Doyle is an artist and recently co-ordinated the EU Celtic Copper Heritage at Avoca Mines. He is currently responsible for RCE North East (http://www.rcenortheast.eu/) and is based at Newcastle University.
Irish Arts Review by Catherine Leen Cu Winter Edition 2009
'Cu': Mining the Landscape in Stephen Lawlor's Paintings.
"Last Tuesday, the finest day that ever was, we went to the Dyke... perhaps the most grand & affecting natural landscape in the world-and consequently a scene the most unfit for a picture. It is the business of a painter not to contend with nature and put this scene (a valley filled with imagery 50 miles long) on a canvas of a few inches, but to make something out of nothing."
John Constable's 1826 letter describing a visit to a famous beauty spot in Sussex could have been written as an introduction to Stephen Lawlor's latest show of landscape paintings, 'Cu.' Early twentieth-century landscape painting in Ireland was intimately associated with nationalism, so that the idealised portrayal of rural locales, particularly in the West, became part of an assertion of a unique cultural identity. Irish landscape art has evolved dramatically since then, however, to become as much a reflection of the artist's engagement with the genre as a response to a particular place. The landscape paintings of Lawlor, an internationally renowned printmaker, are the result of an intensely personal process of investigation and experimentation that began over a decade ago. When he decided to turn to painting, he spent many years studying the works of masters such as Rafael, Da Vinci and Constable. The influence of this engagement with art history is clear when one reviews his series of lushly coloured monoprints of the Italian countryside, shown at the Graphic Studio Gallery in 1997, and even in the backdrops of his other prints, which often took details from the works of Romantic painters and reworked and combined them into his compositions.
He moved from piecing together imaginary landscapes inspired by masterworks to depicting real places in his first show of landscape paintings 'Three Rivers' (2006), which explored Dublin waterways in works that showcased his intuitive understanding of paint, light and colour. His next show of paintings, 'Hinterland' (2009), took him to the forests of Sweden, where his work took on an evocative, mysterious quality provided by the interplay of dark and light and expressive use of paint.
The 14 hauntingly beautiful paintings in 'Cu' explore the seemingly unpromising subject of disused copper mines in Amlwch, Wales, and Avoca, Co. Wicklow, which are linked geologically by the same seam of copper running under the Irish Sea. Lawlor was invited by Dr. Aidan Doyle of Newcastle University to visit the Amlwch mine, and he was stunned to find a panoramic landscape infused with jewel-like colours from mineral elements in the soil. Following Constable's dictum, both sites are transformed into something magical in his paintings. While the Iron Hat series, inspired by Avoca, continues to place great importance on chiaroscuro and light, which the thickly applied paint seems to both store and emit, they also strip down the Romantic vision of the landscape, abstracting and re-imagining it. Amlwch 1 reflects the vastness of the mine by depicting the skyline, pathways and valleys, though again the excitement in the piece comes less from landscape itself and more from the expressionistic use of paint and rich earth tones. Cleft, another work based in Amlwch, has a brooding atmosphere that comes from the use of darker tones and a dense application of paint that gives the surface a richly tactile quality. The swirling paint in all of the works suggests a sense of freedom in Lawlor's paintings. No longer constrained by the painstaking stage-by-stage layering of colour that characterises his intricate printmaking, he clearly revels in the immediacy and even the accidental possibilities offered by oil. His trademark mastery of colour, light and shade adds intensity and movement to the works, which seem to echo the drama of the lives of those who worked in this historically, sociologically and geologically significant landscape. When asked whether painting has superseded printmaking for him, his answer is unequivocal: "I'm not just dabbling in a new medium-I'm a painter." This confident statement is confirmed by assurance of his latest works, which undoubtedly make an important contribution to the continuing evolution of Irish landscape art.
'Cu' will be shown at Fred London Gallery, 45 Vyner St., London, E2 9DQ, from January 7 to February 7, 2010.
Peter Falllon Cat. Essay Hinterland 2009
Stephen Lawlor - Hinterland
To visit an artist's studio to see work-in-progress, even if it's the workplace of an artist one admires, can be fraught with concern. So it was that on a recent afternoon, by Stephen Lawlor's Dublin home, I experienced feelings, first, of relief and then of delight - for the paintings that unrolled before me, marked by a bright confidence, conveyed a place and time, an atmosphere and emotional response. They brightened my day, and the days since I saw them.
A pivotal member of Ireland's Graphic Studio for more than twenty-five years, Stephen Lawlor is an uncommonly successful artist. While maintaining an avid 'audience' of collectors of his prints he retains the respect of his peers.
Let me dwell for a moment on the work I came first to know best. First, in what could be called his signature horse (a subject rendered now in various etchings and in bronze editions) his aim is not verisimilitude. He doesn't aspire to Stubbs' anatomical exactness or to the breathing, snorting likeness of, say, a Géricault. He doesn't try to conjure anything as specific as the horses that wander in our back field, Moses Hill, Ben, or Bella the mare. Rather, he's devoted to the pursuit of a more elemental horse, eohippus, a Platonic ideal. His by now widely known 'Ochre Horse', for example, suggests an heraldic creature, with the grand magnificence of a warhorse from a Parthenon frieze, or a majestic mediaeval charger. (His horses' Classical bent is further invoked in a companion piece, 'Ilium', the Latin name for that ancient city in Asia Minor, site of the Trojan War.) Stephen Lawlor's horse is immediately and utterly recognizable - all mass and presence - because the artist has sought, found, and captured an equine essence. In contrast with this monumental undertaking Stephen Lawlor's more recent 'Winter Wood' is a model of delicate balance. The birches looming out of that dark hinterland evoke the fired fragility of willow pattern china.
We value outstanding graphic work for its integrity, its determination first to be itself. These etchings don't aspire to transfer their subjects realistically, yet they achieve something else - they succeed in becoming, as John Ashbery wrote of the work of his fellow American poet, Frank O'Hara, 'instances of themselves'.
Stephen Lawlor's work has long been remarkable for its mastery of medium and scale. From the careful art of printmaking and, perhaps, in particular intaglio, with the fewer opportunities it offers for going over one's tracks, to repair or revise them, his new paintings demonstrate a way of revelling in the relative freedoms afforded by the great expanses of those enormous rolls of robust paper and of their theme.
It comes as no surprise that, in all his work, Stephen Lawlor exhibits a high degree of technical skill, the fruit of long experience. The technical triumph of the new paintings, as I understand them, lies in the way that the light is not applied but, rather, emerges, or emanates, from behind the image, like light bouncing back from the eye's retina. But what is particularly exciting about these paintings from the forests of Sweden is that for his exceptional technique he has discovered an enthralling subject.
Stephen Lawlor has spoken of his encounter with a revenant, the visiting presence at a manor house adjacent to Galleri Astley, and his new exhibition, Hinterland, features images of this woman in what might be a blood speckled gown, some of them with a kind of crosshatching that interrupts the light of ordinary day and shields her from its glare. In others (as, indeed, in 'Ochre Horse') a web of lines suggests the craquelure of Old Masters. In these portraits the religious matter of earlier work (crucifixions, archangels, a papal audience, images of Christ) give way to something heterodox. His paintings of the forests, lakesides, riverbanks and clearings - but especially the forests! - around Uttersberg and Skinnskatteberg are enlivened with a comparable atmosphere and drama. In them the paths and passageways through the woods suggest the twists and turns of an unfolding (but, perhaps, never ending) narrative. There are, among these birches and evergreens, patches of smoky, misty areas. In short, there is about them, too, a haunted sense, and that spectral impression devolves from the essence of the place to which they attend. Essence - as intrinsic nature, that quality which determines character. Essence - the property or properties without which something would not exist or be quite as it is. And Essence, too, in the sense of something extracted or concentrated from something.
In these essential paintings and prints Stephen Lawlor has rendered, or translated, a place into exquisite art. The tall, commanding uprights of trees are offset by the subtler force of horizontal surfaces, lake and river, lakeshore and river side, and by the shocking close-up of individual leaves in, say, 'Forest Floor'. That shock of lights persists as a series of highlights on the vertical trunks and in reflections of water and leaves.
I've suggested that Stephen Lawlor is better known as a printmaker than as a painter. On the evidence of this new, coruscating work, this may change. The full flourish of the work in Hinterland represents an important milestone, and advance, on the journey of this artist. He has returned with interest the rewards of his visits to a hinterland of Sweden.
Peter Fallon,
Loughcrew, January 2009
Peter Fallon is the founder editor of The Gallery Press, Ireland's leading literary publishing house. His most recent books of poetry are The Georgics of Virgil and The Company of Horses.
Ruairí Ó Cuív Cat. Essay Three Rivers 2008
An Exhibition of New Paintings by Stephen Lawlor
7th - 29th February 2008-01-09 at Hillsboro Fine Art
Three Rivers
As an entry point into art, Stephen Lawlor found printmaking to be a process which suited him best. The technicality and in many respects the predictability of the process offered him space and methodology to focus on the creative aspects of art making. To many artists printmaking is tedious, too technical for most, but Lawlor thrived under the rigour required. So it is not surprising that when Lawlor began to explore painting as a medium, he ventured into this form of expression with the use of technology as part of the process. The three rivers which are the subject of this exhibition are the principal rivers of Dublin; the Tolka, Liffey and Dodder. Lawlor has particularly chosen territory familiar to him, the Tolka as it meanders through the National Botanic Gardens, the changing industrial docklands on the Liffey, both areas near where he lives, and the Dodder between Irishtown and Ballsbridge where he grew up. His knowledge of this landscape and his growing interest in abstraction, led him away from the more descriptive portrayal of subjects, though there is evidence of this in a small number of paintings such as For TT, Landscape and Landscape 2. But viewing this exhibition in its totality, it is clear that the potential offered through abstraction is what particularly excites him. Rather than painting 'en plein air' he uses a digital camera, much as artists have traditionally used a sketchbook. The digital camera is immediate, requiring simple processing to transform photographs onto computer, leaving the artist in control. With the computer he experiments with the images, exploring the pixilation, fascinated by how images of familiar territory can be manipulated and distorted. This allows him to focus on detail, enhancing effects of colour or light or to enlarge images to the point where they become almost unrecognisable. It also offers him a multitude of possibilities presenting a challenge which he resolves as he paints.
The surfaces in Lawlor's paintings are richly layered with paint, as he builds from more descriptive and initial ideas on canvas towards a state of abstraction, developing the subject until he is happy that the painting is complete. While the approach and technique are fairly constant the resulting work is varied, reflecting the different places, times of year, weather. A series of small paintings based on the Tolka, Surface 1- Surface 3 are dark and moody, flecked with speckles of light evocative of the still waters in the Botanic Gardens. In contrast, a second series Tolka 1- Tolka 3 gives the feeling of a completely different day as these paintings are painted with dense brushwork using black, grey and white as if colour has been filtered out. His engagement with a large crane at the Liffey docklands provides a contrasting subject for Lawlor. In Liebherr 1 - 6, his fascination with the detail of this mechanical monster, which has a strange industrial beauty, results in paintings with a radically different palette and line than those based on more pastoral subjects. The industrial red colour of the crane is defined in bold line and shape, as Lawlor captures a part of the quickly changing landscape in the inner city docklands, where the area is being transformed from industrial landscape to a residential, office and leisure district. Perhaps the most lyrical paintings have been inspired by the Dodder where rural and urban seem to combine, as new development meets with the walkways and banks of the Dodder which have not substantially changed in many decades. A leaning branch of Fuchsia over the river is abstracted into a composition Dodder, Fuschia and in Dodder 1, blues, greens, whites and hints of pink create a rhythmic dance of colour on canvas. Dodder 2 and Dodder 3, contrast with these flashes of colour with the use of a much closer colour range, the former seeming to be the painting equivalent of a 'close up' with Dodder 3 offering a more panoramic sense of the river. This exhibition is a major development in Stephen Lawlor's career as he revels in the challenges and freedoms offered by painting. Since a human first mixed pigment to apply to a cave wall, or used a tool to carve into stone, technology has been an integral part of the process of artmaking. The gift which artists have is to use and subvert the technology, to present something personal for our consideration. In Three Rivers, Stephen Lawlor has undoubtedly achieved this.
Ruairí Ó Cuív December 2007
For further information contact John Daly at Hillsboro Fine Art, 49 Parnell Square West, Dublin 1.
Tel 01-8788242 Mob.087-2444963. info@hillsborofineart.com | www.hillsborofineart.com
Aidan Dunne Irish Times Review, Three Rivers 2008
Three Rivers at Hillsboro Fine Art
Friday February 7th 2008
Irish Times by Aidan Dunne
Stephen Lawlor comes to painting with a long track record as a printmaker. One might expect the printmaker's characteristic emphasis on technique and that is the case, though not in the way we might anticipate. There is no tightness or over-attentiveness to finish. In fact, as with Donald Teskey, who came to painting from a Graphic background, Lawlor has positively embraced the medium for it's own distinct possibilities.
His Hillsboro show is based on three Dublin Rivers, all familiar to him, Liffey, Dodder and the Tolka as it flows through the National Botanic Gardens.
Using a digital cameras a sketchbook, he has worked from manipulated images to produce very rich, free painterly accounts of water, vegetation and also the mechanical, in the form of a huge crane at Docklands.
It makes for a striking body of work.
Catherine Leen Cat. Essay Memory & Desire 2005
Memory and Desire
'Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.' - Leonardo da Vinci.
Penumbra, Afterglow, Lumen, Diffusion. All words used to describe light and its effects, yet all were ultimately rejected as possible titles for this show. Although Stephen Lawlor's works are certainly characterised by a uniquely luminous quality of light, these words proved to be too literal and failed to capture the poetic, otherworldly feeling that unites the prints in this exhibition. The title that was finally chosen was inspired by the opening lines of T.S. Eliot's 'The Wasteland', a poem that has deep affinities with Lawlor's images in its references to memory, loss, longing, chance encounters, and, above all, a deep but understated spirituality. Eliot did not present the reader with symbols that can be easily deciphered, offering instead a kaleidoscopic array of allusive words and scenarios that are often inter-textual. Similarly, Lawlor's works have a distinctly suggestive rather than representational approach, evoking impressions of, or reactions to, a subject, rather than depicting it literally. Lawlor also absorbs myriad sources from art history and makes them his own. Unlike Eliot, however, Lawlor's exquisite body of works creates a dreamlike landscape full of ambiguity rather than a wasteland, and represents both a new stage in his artistic evolution and a synthesis of his career to date.
This career has been notable both for his personal artistic achievements and his considerable contribution to printmaking in Ireland and abroad through his work with the Graphic Studio Print Workshop. These dual roles are combined in his organisational position and participation in group shows such as Art into Art at the National Gallery of Ireland in 1998 and Holy Show at the Chester Beatty Library in 2002. His prints have featured in countless other group and solo exhibitions at home and abroad, and form part of notable collections including the National Gallery, Allied Irish Bank, Dublin City University, and the Office of Public Works. Over the past several years, Lawlor has also turned his attention to painting and has had a number of successful solo shows, including those in Stockholm and Dublin in 2003 and Sligo in 2004.
To admirers of Lawlor's work the horse is undoubtedly the most familiar image. As he has previously noted, the subject was initially inspired by the anatomical studies of the English painter George Stubbs, but developed to become an exploration of the figurative and abstract dimensions of the subject. Ochre Horse clearly suggests this trajectory in an image that both captures the essence of the animal and explores tonal varieties of light and shade. The large-scale mono-prints are related to painting not only through their painterly source, but also in their technique, as the paint is applied directly to the copper plate, without the use of etching, resulting in a loose, even Romantic revisiting of the subject. The horse image also features in a series of four small-scale bronze sculptures. The move from paper to sculpture was prompted by the artist's visit to a Dublin foundry, and by many suggestions that his horses had a three-dimensional quality and would thus be an ideal subject for sculpture. The resulting works, as Lawlor observes, are 'like creating fifty individual drawings, as they need to work from every angle simultaneously.'
The small-scale landscapes are the most intimate works in the show, drawing the viewer into scenes that are reminiscent of journeys and transitions. These works are both continuations of concerns that are notable in Lawlor's work throughout his career and composites in themselves. Lawlor has always drawn on sources from art history and used these works, mainly paintings, as palimpsests that form the basis for his own reactions to nature. Various elements in a particular landscape print, whether a tree, a cloud, a road or a mountain, may come from a different origin and combine to create theatrical panoramas that are often more a meditation on the landscape as a genre, than a depiction of a particular place. What is most striking about this referencing of the work of past masters is the sense of atmosphere and tension achieved. This tension takes on a spiritual dimension in several other pieces in this exhibition. Woman at Otter Mountain is based on the tragic story of a woman whose spirit haunts a manor house in central Sweden where her husband killed their child and then committed suicide. What first appears to be an intricate study in pattern and line as the artist deftly traces the embroidery of her skirt becomes an evocation of eternal torment, with the figure's face revealed to be a cracked, faded echo of a human visage. Even the pop culture figure Batman takes on a sombre cast in the haunting representation of him entitled Ecce Homo. Lawlor began working with this shadowy icon as an experiment that was almost discarded. It survived, however, and Batman has been transformed from comic book hero to Renaissance man. The softening of his graphic edges had led him to become a more ambiguous, mysterious character that both in his roots in another artistic field and in his status as a mythical figure, complements the otherworldly protagonists of several individual pieces.
Perhaps the clearest departure from the artist's signature themes of horse and landscape is a series of Crucifixions and an image based on the Annunciation. The four small-scale pieces entitled Crucifixion and the large Christ prints follow on from works made in 2004, reducing the figurative components so that the composition is honed to its essential elements. These prints are further examples of Lawlor's intuitive knowledge of art history, as he first addressed this theme after being moved by a Crucifixion by Delacroix, which was itself an adaptation of a Rubens painted two hundred years earlier. These works are also related to a very personal motivation, however. Some time ago he received a request from a friend who had recently been diagnosed with a terminal illness for a painting that could help him to reconcile himself to God. Even this inherently devotional subject is dealt with in a manner that foregrounds the importance of the mood evoked by the image. This approach is also found in the Annunciation and in The Interview, where a meeting between Pope Urban II and his teacher St. Bruno, originally captured by Spanish painter Zurbarán, becomes a mysterious encounter infused with drama and a distinctly ominous feeling. This concentration on mood is central to Lawlor's philosophy of art: 'I don't generally like clever or conceptual art. I prefer to create an atmosphere and develop an image within. The result has a much longer lasting and emotionally deeper appeal.'
Their extremely diverse subject matter notwithstanding the work in this show shares in common an extremely seductive style. The alluring quality of light that defines all the pieces is the result of a highly complex technique that has been honed over almost two decades. This involves a combination of the method known as spit biting with a careful manipulation of the plate tone. The open areas of the prints, such as the skies, are smooth copper that is inked but holds only a skim of ink known as a plate tone. The other areas of the print are aquatinted by spit biting, which involves applying acid with a brush alongside water so that the acid runs into the water and a soft edge is created between darkness and light. There is thus a contrast between dense areas of deep aquatint and lighter areas with some plate tone, resulting in an even more subtle gradation on the light areas. The control of plate tone is painstakingly achieved by hand, putting to use an intuitive, tactile experience that is akin to painting. These effects are further enriched by repeating the process on three or four plates, so that a layering of colour and tone is apparent.
Although the most obvious departure in this exhibition is the presence of sculptures, all of the works mark a major evolution in terms of the range of subjects addressed and in the assurance with which they are explored. This confidence is intrinsically linked to a technical skill perfected throughout Lawlor's career, as well as to his innovative use of the accomplishments of past masters to produce a synthesis of old and new. The prints, mono-prints and sculptures that make up this show are above all remarkably beautiful and even haunting in their skilled manipulation of light and dark and their intricate layering of jewel-like colours. Lawlor's works are testament to the continuing relevance and creative potential of printmaking and to his singular sensitivity towards the medium.
Catherine Leen 2005