All of these paintings were made while on a Fellowship at The Ballinglen Arts Foundation, B
allycastle, Co. Mayo.
I am then very grateful to Margo Dolan, Peter Maxwell and The Ballinglen Arts Foundation for giving me the opportunity to work, for an extended period, in North Mayo.
From our first visit in the golden light of December 1997 to our most recent visit, the summer of 1999, I and my family, who accompanied me on each visit, have been enthralled by the beauty of North Mayo. We have had the unforgettable expe-rience of witnessing its changes from winter through spring to summer.
Of seeing how the light paints another and yet another land-scape.
It has been an experience that will linger and influence us for many years to come.
My thanks also to Sean and Sheila McSweeney for introducing me to Ballinglen and for their kindness and generous advice over the past two years.
Pat Harris
Tielrode, August 1999
Aidan Dunne on the painting of Pat Harris:
The west coast of Ireland, rugged and indented under the ceaseless onslaught of the North Atlantic, offering only a precarious toe-hold for its human inhabitants, roman-ticised in the paintings of Jack B. Yeats and Paul Henry, the plays of John M. Synge, has come to symbolise lrishness. But the west isn’t really reducible to one emblem-atic landscape. In fact, the Atlantic seaboard comprises a fantastically varied range of environments. While mass tourism has long been established in Galway city and Connemara, and in West Cork and Kerry, much of the huge, daunting expanses of north County Mayo have proved more resistant to recreational appropriation.
The great Irish naturalist Robert Lloyd Praeger wrote in 1937 that from Mallaranny on Clew Bay one could walk thirty miles northwards "to the giant cliffs of North Mayo, and your foot need never leave the heather save that twice you cross a road, fence-less, winding like a narrow white ribbon through the endless brown bog. And if your course lies east of Bangor, you will hardly even see a house. "Extraordinarily, the same thing holds true today, as does his observation that the drive along the road on "the biggest bog in Ireland," from Bangor to Crossmolina, "is almost frightening in its isolation".
This landscape is liberally pitted with lakes and pools, and underlain by a varied and in places extremely ancient geology, rocks that make their presence felt only along the coastline in the form of superb sea cliffs and stacks, and inland in isolated promi-nences and the hard quartzites of the Nephin Beg mountain range. Generally, how-ever, the stone is densely covered by some 400 square miles of aptly named blanket bog. Once you are away from the shore, the heavy, saturated vegetative mantle lays another blanket over the land, a blanket of silence.
Yet the inhospitable terrain isn’t only the preserve of wind and rain. By probing beneath the bogland, Seamus Caulfield, acting on the observations of his father, has traced the outlines of an ancient, very different landscape beneath the turf, a world of cleared woodlands, walled fields, settlements and tombs, most famously at the Ceide Fields, but also elsewhere in North Mayo. It is a salutary reminder that the quiet, impassive landscape, seemingly remote from the noise and rush of urban life, is nonetheless steeped in human history, from those early farmers to the impover-ished peasants who suffered in terrible conditions during the Famine, and the small communities who live there today.
To approach Mayo as a painter is to take on not only its human history, past and pres-ent, and the mythical status of the West, but also the physical isolation and immen-sity of the environment. Pat Harris has been based in Belgium for many years now. His route to the West has been indirect. Paintings of the human figure became paintings of the figure as landscape. He made studies of flowers, and of the polders, calm flat green spaces seasonally invaded by impassive sheets of water, throwing back the white glare of winter light. Keen to do some work based on the Irish landscape, and with the encouragement of painter Sean McSweeney and the Ballinglen Arts foun-dation, he by-passed the east coast and found himself in North Mayo.
Over the course of several visits, he has built up a substantial body of work that is exemplary in its patient attentiveness to the landscape. Inevitably he was struck by its sheer scale, but rather than attempting to match its epic qualities with epic paint-ings, he felt he should approach it on a close, intimate level. Perhaps he saw a link between the ubiquitous bog pools and the flooded polders: in both it seems as if the water is welling up out of the earth. He has remarked that while people describe the terrain as hard, it never seemed that way to him. The elements are hard: the sea wear-ing down the land, the rain dissolving it, the wind scouring it. But the land itself, he feels, is fragile. Sea stacks, like the Stags of Broad Haven, are emblems of the relent-less pounding of the waves and the stubborn resistance of the rock.
Put a sea stack in a painting and the automatic temptation is to capture the drama of waves pounding against stone, but that isn’t at all what happens here. The rock, like the landmass, has a quiet, subdued presence. It was the quietness, as well, of vast tracts of bog that impressed him, and his paintings seem to emanate silence. What we get in the work is an account of several places revisited during different seasons. But absolutely nothing is dramatised. Whereas a few centuries ago a painter would have taken liberties with topography - add a crag here, a waterfall there - and incor-porated Payer upon layer of iconographic incident, here the iconography is simply edited out, the topography distilled to an essence. A few planes of moody, subdued colour do all the work: greys, blue-greens, earths. But the expanse of the Atlantic flattened to coincide with the picture plane, somehow retains its distance and its scale. As do the Stags, and a flank of mountain under blanket bog.
Often there is very little actual paint involved. It’s at least as much a process of sub-traction as addition. Up close, you’re looking at an essentially abstract, flat, tonal study. Draw back and you recognise a landscape that, the chances are, is familiar to anyone who has ever visited North Mayo, such is its atmospheric accuracy. If it weren’t for the fact of those motifs, the stacks, the pools, you could say that for Harris, it’s the spaces between things, rather than the things themselves, that are important. But then, it’s the spaces that define the things, and the spaces are indeed important, setting the tone, providing a sense of place. Finally, there is the question of time. In the paintings, those pools, stacks and mountains are nothing less than pools and stacks and mountains of time, and the painter is like an archaeologist, pushing a rod deep into the bog to trace the outline of the landscape’s history, a history that is gently, tactfully implicit in the calm, forgiving surfaces of his work.
Aidan Dunne
REVIEW
Arts West magazine #64:
In Paintings of North Mayo Pat Harris treads a path well worn by visiting artists, the portrayal of the Mayo landscape with its shifting light and dramatic scenery. Harris imbues it with a monolithic quality, working with expressive, broad strokes, the paint applied thinly enough to emphasize the attack of the brush. The customary subject matter is here - headlands, cliffs, islands and mountains, and Harris describes them with a reductive eye. The results are pared down, unrefined, blurred. Muted greens, blues and greys abound, at times applied with a lightness of touch, in other instances producing a dense, ‘muddy’ feel.
The paintings are at their best when the figuration succumbs to a more abstract, sensual experience, as in At Portacloy, Summer ’99, Kilcumin Head, Summer ’99 and Turf Stack at Carrowteigue, Summer ’99. Included in the exhibition are a number of sketches in watercolours and charcoals, which offer insight into the artistic processes at work. The charcoals in particular display expressive depth and tonal control, and provide some of the highlights of the show.
Ian Wieczorek
PAT HARRIS
1953 Born in Dublin
1972-73 Evening student, The National College of Art and Design (NCAD), Dublin
1973-77 Full-time student, NCAD
1977 Diploma "2-1 Honours Painting", NCAD
1977- 78 Post Graduate Year, NCAD
1977-78 Lecturer in Life Drawing, College of Marketing and Design, Dublin
1978 -81 Studied at the National Higher, Institute of Fine Arts, Antwerp, Belgium
1981 Diploma: National Higher lnstitute of Fine Arts, Antwerp, Belgium
1986 Invited Artist for Monoprint at the "North Light Editions", Portland, Oregon, USA
1986 - Lecturer in Painting at the Royal academy of Fine Arts, Present Antwerp
present
AWARDS
1980 First Prize, "Prijs van de Prins", Club XII, K.A.S.K.A.
1986 Commission Award, Arnotts National Portrait Award Exhibition, Dublin
1993 Selection, "Europe-Prize for Painting", Oostende, Belgium
1993 First Prize, International Prize for Marine-Painting Mercatorfonds, Antwerp, Belgium
1995 First Prize, "Prize Ernest Albert", for Painting, Mechelen, Belgium
ONE MAN SHOWS
1979 Gallery Danthe, Antwerp, Belgium
1981 Romi Goldmutz, Antwerp, Belgium
1982 Taylor Galleries, Dublin
1986 County Museum, Temse, Belgium
1986 Taylor Galleries, Dublin
1989 Taylor Galleries, Dub/n
1992 Gallery Brabo, Mercatorbuilding, Antwerp, Belgium
1995 Retrospective, Arts Centre Spinoy, Mechelen, Belgium
1996 Taylor Galleries, Dublin
1996 De Zwarte Panter, Antwerp, Belgium
1999 The Linenhall, Castlebar, Co Mayo
1999 Taylor Galleries, Dublin
|
