HARRY VINCE COULTERt
Mountains & Bays: Mayo/Sligo Paintings
1948 Born London
1965-66 Twickenham College of Technology
1966-70 Chelsea School of Art
1970-71 Hornsey College of Art
1977-78 NCAD
Selected Exhibitions
1971 Curtain Street Studios, London
1971 Consort Gallery, Imperial College, London
1971 Oval House, London
1998 1999 North West Artists, Sligo Art Gallery
1999 Eigse Carlow
1999 Tinahely Courthouse Centre, Co. Wicklow
1999 Linenhall Arts Centre, Castlebar, Co. Mayo
Harry Vince Coulter:
Usually at one-person shows like this one finds a longish CV of the artist, listing shows held and awards received. Although I am now 51 years old this is not the case for me, because I virtually stopped painting for many years, resuming about seven years ago. So, in spite of my age, this is the first one-person show I have held in some years.
I began to paint again towards the end of the 1 980s during stays in Ireland, in places I had known since the 1970s. I filled sketchbooks and made many small works. I was driven to paint but not immediately able to codify what was implied, in terms of content.
I was actually drawing from the landscape, or rather from experiences of being in the landscape, in ways mediated by the art of the late twentieth century. At that time I hesitated to see the landscape as source, preferring to see the paintings as ‘landscape-like’. Landscape painting was dismissed as archaic by many critics in Britain and the USA. Indeed, by the time I began to paint again even painting itself was passé. Anything in the visual arts which had a provenance of more than a decade seemed to have become ‘historical’.
The Irish landscape and its very stones carry a weight of history and politi-cal nuance with which I am familiar. But I couldn’t draw from the tradition of Anglo-Irish realism or Irish regional modernism which have their own assumptions of place. I came from a different perspective, but it was this island, over a long period, which had reawakened my imagination, and not the island of my youth or an imaginary American cultural island. I knew this was the ground on which I could work. Since moving back in 1 990 an engagement with the landscape in the two areas of Mayo/Sligo and Wicklow/Wexford has provided my primary visual material, made my own not by representation but transformation in the act of painting.
Harry Vince’s extraordinary landscape paintings of Sligo and North Mayo shimmer with an intensity hard to miss among the muted, cautious colours of much contemporary Irish landscape painting. Vince is English in background, a former habitué of Garnish coasts, London art schools and the fervid world of ’60s cultural politics; but these swirling, shifting, exuberant creations could, in his own view, have sprung only from the spiritual geography of Ireland. Vince’s depictions of English landscape have a harder sharper edge to them, as befits what he sees as a more static scenario; these Irish canvases, by contrast, are all about flux, dynamism, deliquescence, as jagged coast and solid rock are recomposed in the more merging, soluble media of water and air.
This is not a question of ‘abstraction’. If Vince is a modernist, he is one only in a generous, non-doctrinaire sense of the term. Indeed these fractured, pulsating paintings are, in his own opinion, perfectly realist. These are real places he has lived among, but ones which have been decomposed and reassembled according to an imaginative rather than material logic. Actual space plays a part in these marvellous reinventions, but it is space which has been wrenched apart and relayered, restacked from the horizon-tal to the vertical, scattered into different pockets, levels and cross-currents. Horizons are scrubbed out, or multiplied, and the usual laws of perspective put into suspense, so that we move in a space which appears to face every way at once, and which, like some close-spun textile seems at once dense and infinitely stretchable. This vivid, irregular stuff then spills out over the frame and laps from one canvas to the other so that each painting seems like a snapshot of a potentially limitless process. Here, indeed, lies the ‘realism’ of Vince’s art, since the Irish landscapes he portrays are unbounded in their continual play of light, sea and cloud. Since their reality is ceaseless change, only this diffuse, perpetually mobile art can be faithful to it. In a sense, it is the weather he is painting, not the scenery.
Though the regions Vince shapes are starkly unpopulated, the human can always be sensed in the intense activism of his craft. In fact Vince is an activist in more senses than one. A few decades back, this scenarist of Sligo was producing public art for British revolutionary politics, and is still involved in political life. But it is Stalinism, not socialism, which restricts politically charged art to a dreary naturalism. Bertolt Brecht, by contrast, recognised that the revolutionary artist needed to deconstruct the world if others were to change it. Harry Vince’s painting is politically significant in exactly this sense - just as there is political meaning in the deliberate daylight it puts between itself and the postmodern art industry. Landscape, lyricism, large--sized canvases, boldly glowing colours: these things may not be exactly à la mode in the art world today. But Vince works out of an English landscape tradition which has survived through the bleakest artistic times, and his splendid work resonates with a fresh spirit.
Terry Eagleton
REVIEW
Arts West magazine #66:
Tidy collages of paint splashed the walls of the Linenhall Arts Centre Gallery in December. The exhibition was an ebullient collection of landscapes by Harry Vince Coulter. In this show, Coulter has followed the current trend of landscape artists of depicting the Irish rural environment as natural, ignoring the omnipresent mark of human hands. This seemed a curious choice as Coulter so obviously enjoys using his own hands to configure these landscapes. Paintings were torn apart, reassembled and re-worked to form land and cliffs, horizons and skies. Horizons were repeated from different vantage points, often within the same piece. The paintings stretch panoramically into each other, perhaps sharing swatches from the same original pieces.
The result is a body of work with a strong Atlantic identity without the rich to bleak coastal and bog hues. From where has his palate come? While the works excite because of their vibrancy, there is also a homogeneity to them - a puzzling duality. I miss in Coulter's paintings the variety brought by the seasons and weather. Still, his vibrant take on Irish "nature" leaves me wondering how I will get through winter without his vision.
Coulter's work has been very popular, as evidenced by the entire show having been sold. I think the work appeals because it is identifiable as our landscape yet feels happier than the reality, offering up a snort of bright optimism this winter.
Heidi Marion
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