The Liminal World - John Banville - Introduction to Gandon Profile #29 - EXTRACT:-
In 1959, on holiday in Italy, Mark Rothko paid a visit with his family to the Graeco-Roman city of Paestum on the Amalfi coast south of Naples. Paestum boasts three Doric temples generally agreed to be among the best preserved of their kind in the world. Rothko had already visited Pompeii and had felt a ‘deep affinity’ between his own painting and the murals in the House of Mysteries there, in which he recognised ‘the same feeling, the same broad expanses of sombre colour.’[1] Now, at Paestum, he was similarly struck by the modelling of the temples, at once groundedly monumental and celestially lightsome, and wholly mysterious.
On the journey down from Naples the party had fallen in with a couple of Italian youths who offered to act as guides. At Paestum, where the odd-assorted little band picnicked at noon in the Temple of Hera, the young men expressed their curiosity as to the identity and occupations of the Americans. The daughter of a friend of Rothko’s was acting as interpreter, and now she turned to him and said: ‘I have told them that you are an artist, and they ask whether you came here to paint the temples,’ to which Rothko replied: ‘Tell them that I have been painting Greek temples all my life without knowing it.’[2]
The anecdote brought to mind Martin Heidegger’s great essay The Origin of the Work of Art, in which the philosopher meditates on the way in which an ancient temple such as the ones at Paestum not only ‘encloses the figure of the god’ but is an agent of physis, by which the Greeks meant, according to Heidegger, the ‘emerging and rising in itself’ of the essence of a thing. ‘The temple’s firm towering makes visible the invisible space of air.’[3]
Considering the paintings and prints of Stephen Lawlor, I am struck by how apposite to so many of his paintings and prints is that notion in Heidegger’s essay of an art that ‘makes visible the invisible space of air’. And whether intentionally or not, Lawlor all his life has been painting the temples which nature builds out of air, space and light, and which it decorates profusely with the world’s gloriously jumbled stuff.
That world exists, in these works, in a liminal state, oddly resistant to the eye’s grasp and yet wholly palpable, wholly there. Gazing into one of his canvases you find yourself being drawn deep and deeper into a landscape—or a ‘landscape’—sumptuous yet uncertain, that is at once familiar and ineffably mysterious. It is a magical, slightly eerie sensation; you seem astray in a forest, a garden, a numinously shadowed cityscape, under a turbulent, gold-and-umber sky that seems more solid, more grounded, than the ground you tread on.
You arrive in a clearing and come upon a gold horse standing by an etiolated tree; the air is blurred with radiant litter, gilded smoke, bright bits of things whirling in a whirl of wind.
Next thing you turn a corner, a dark door opens, and you confronted by—the Lone Ranger with a six-shooter in his hand. Oh, and yes, off behind him in sixteenth-century Dowlandesque darkness sits—can it be?—Good Queen Bess herself.
Why are these people, this Queen, this gunslinger, these Geishas delicate as porcelain, why are they here? They are filled with purpose yet stilled in the midst of action, listening for, attendant on, some expected word, the news from elsewhere.
The years go on, and Lawlor’s figured world dimmens even as the impasto becomes ever thicker and the colours more intense—Lawlor is one of the great colourists, and has a remarkable ability to brighten the tones of his scenes as the shadows gather and the air grows sombre. Everything here, even in his most nearly abstract images, takes place against, or even in the midst of, a great, depthless darkness, so that at the height of the day we are in a kind of luminous night—the lambent night of Shakespeare’s Forest of Arden. Indeed, all, in these works, is a waking dream and a dreaming awareness.
Art of Evocation - Essay - John P O’Sullivan - Gandon Profile #29 EXTRACT:-
In 2004 a seminal event occurred in Stephen Lawlor’s life and its reverberations can be detected in his work ever since. It happened on a trip to Uttersberg, a town located a couple of hours north of Stockholm. The Graphic Studio Dublin (GSD) had an exhibition at Galleri Astley, an arts centre and museum in the town. Lawlor, as chairman of the board of GSD, was invited to speak at the show which was being opened by Ireland’s Ambassador to Sweden. The evening before the opening his hosts put him up in an 18th century hunting lodge nearby that operated as a small hotel. He retired early determined to get a good night's sleep before the auspicious event. He assured me when recounting what happened that he also retired sober: “there was no drinking that night.” After he had put down his book (Last Train to Memphis, Peter Guralnick’s definitive biography of Elvis Presley) and turned off the lamp, he became aware of some small circles of light at the foot of the bed "like grey smoke glowing". These circles gradually coalesced into cheek-bones, then came ears, eyes, face, head, neck and finally a complete female figure manifested itself, dressed in old-fashioned apparel. The woman appeared angry and "she lunged at me really savage". Lawlor defended himself (a little ungallantly you might think) by means of a "Ringsend uppercut" (a kick to the groin) and the apparition disappeared. When he mentioned this alarming experience to his hostess the next morning she was unphased. She told him that this phantom made regular appearances in the house and had once put a group of burly Swedish tradesmen to flight when she appeared to them during renovation work. Lawlor is hardly the superstitious type. There's too much of the trenchant Dub in him you feel to indulge the magical, mystical side of life. But he was so affected by this incident that he returned subsequently with a film crew and made a short film about the house and its seemingly haunted room. More significantly, he continues to be deeply moved by the experience. "It doesn't leave you. It stays in your head". Knowing about this episode, it’s not hard to see intimations of the other-worldly in his later oil paintings. A painting such as Woman from 2009 seems the most direct rendering of his ghostly apparition. While Judith II and Lucrezia from his Some Untidy Spot exhibition in 2015 also contain reverberations . Lawlor himself affirms the connection: "It has subsequently affected my work". I would never have made those images had she not shown herself in such an memorable way.” However, long before this strange episode, Lawlor’s early work in the GSD was strongly influenced by artists from the 15th and 16th Century - so shades of the past were already at work in his subconscious. Perhaps his epiphany in a dark wood in Sweden was a momentary bubbling to the surface of these images from the Quattrocento.
It’s been a long and winding road to Lawlor’s current status as one of Ireland’s most versatile and successful artists. It’s a journey that involved a few false starts, early rejection, and a struggle to establish himself amongst his peers. But once he had belatedly recognized his vocation, he persisted at it in a single-minded and determined fashion. Today he has sloughed off his outsider persona and is relishing his role as an established artist on the contemporary scene. He is now a member of Aosdana, a regular at the RHA’s Annual exhibition and he shows with two prestigious Dublin galleries: Oliver Sears Gallery and SO Fine Art Editions. He is also successful internationally and has galleries in the UK, Norway, Sweden and Australia. He was recently elected a member of the Royal Society of Painter-Print Makers in London and featured on the cover of its annual catalogue.
Talking About Art - Taking Pleasure in the Past - O&A between Oliver Sears and Stephen Lawlor for Gandon Profile #29 ETRACT:-
When I first got to know you and became aware of your work, you were very much a printmaker who used lithography, carborundum and etching techniques primarily.
This is a highly technical way of mark making. What drew you to this area of fine art?
In 1983 I took a course at Graphic Studio Dublin Print workshop to find out if I might like printmaking. I had no idea that I would still be making prints almost 40 years later. I started with etching and then worked at Monoprint, Lithography and Carborundum for the first ten years. These, in many ways suited me better as they were closer to directly drawing the image on a surface as opposed to the tight confines of etching. It was a good environment to work in with so many established artists coming and going, and the technical level was high. I think I was lucky to have found myself in a place at a time when so much was happening continually. I worked on prints with artists like Michael Farrell, Richard Gorman, Patrick Pye, Patrick Hickey, Brian Maguire and Alice Maher among many others and learned a lot from each about how they approached their work. I eventually stayed with multiple plate etching and focused on developing the skill and coming to grips with the deeper technical aspects of printmaking but more specifically for me how colour can be used. I worked also with other printmakers on projects to promote our own work, the studio and printmaking in general. This too was a great learning experience in all aspects of that other part of being an artist.
When I think back to the nineties, your preoccupations in terms of subject matter seemed to focus on imagined, classically inspired landscapes and mythical and ancient renditions of horses. Where do these themes come from?
They were all originally taken in parts from western painting from the early 14th century through until almost the 19th century. This was a rich place to plunder for a lot of different reasons. I liked the flatness of early Renaissance paintings and appropriated elements from them to create a large series of small landscape etchings. Working at that scale I could change direction easily and became very flexible in working with copper plates. Simple combinations of overlapping colour using spit bite aquatint and especially controlled levels of plate tone became a way to increase atmosphere, drama and tension. I liked the idea of looking at landscape through the eyes of those masters from a ‘pre-camera’ viewpoint. It was I suppose another reality in a sense. They contained elements of theatrical images like stage sets for tragedies. Horses are pre-human, wild and powerful with very primordial overtones. Perhaps too though it is partially an Irish affinity with them that we all share. That anthropomorphic thing was also underlying these works which is part of the deep human-horse psychological relationship. They started to inhabit some of the landscapes (or maybe it was the other way around?) with a heavy animal quality and it was put to me more than once that there was something sexual about them. It is a form I have become comfortable and familiar with over time and I still very occasionally re-visit.
THE WEATHER IN STEPHEN LAWLOR - Afterword by Theo Dorgan Gandon Profile #29 - EXTRACT:-
When it comes to storing prints and paintings in memory, I often tag them with a word that will hold them for revisiting, a navigation mark to guide me back through the memory banks to where they rest for my contemplation. Stephen Lawlor's prints are tagged, irresistibly, with the word 'serenity'.
We take the word from the Latin 'serenus', meaning 'clear, fair, calm', in usage originally applied to climate and weather. And there is a certain weather in Stephen's prints that is consistent whether the ostensible subjects are indoors or outdoors, the weather or climate of relaxed contemplation. Some of this weather is to do with the handling of light — rarely turbulent or menacing, most often receding, occupying the back of the image and readable, mostly, as sky. There's a Zen-like quality to the light in Stephen's prints, the light of open mind meditation. The landscape features are invariably still, his trees particularly so, not a breath of wind moves through these images to disturb our rapt contemplation. The air of serenity is both underwritten and guaranteed by the emphatic but understated mastery of technique — never showy or bravura, to be enjoyed to the full for its own sake but always at the service of the image.
We tend to think of serenity as somehow at home in the blue end of the spectrum, which makes it all the more intriguing that Stephen more often than not relies on reds and blacks, and sometimes umber to produce these distillations of quiet. His portrait images are featureless more often than not, which should be disturbing, or at the very least distract from their power as portraits, yet almost invariably the effect produced is the opposite: a kind of comfort, a sense of being at ease, which is perhaps the consequence of not feeling demands are being made of me. More usually, the more emphatically present as a person.