Patrick Pye's religious paintings are inspired by early Christian art, and are a celebration of his own faith, he tells Aidan Dunne.
Patrick Pye does not just make paintings on religious themes, he is a religious artist to his very heart. He was incensed when I described him once as a "devotional painter", not necessarily because devotion is lacking in his work, but because, he felt, that aspect of things is between him and his God, and not for someone else to ascribe to him. He happily agrees, though, that his art is a celebration of the revealed truth of scripture.
Such demonstrations of unalloyed faith are rare in an era of irony, not to mention in a climate of a judicious scepticism of institutional authority. But one feels that the highs and recent lows of the church's temporal role are not Pye's priority; he is focused more on the core theological issues, out to create epiphanic work radiant with the certainties of divine revelation. "For God," he has written, "embodiment is creation, His divine creation being his Son, the divine Humanity. For us, embodiment is artificing, the lies in form that make the truth vivid." In this he could be described as something of an artistic anachronism.
"It amazes me," he says, "that I am so alone." Alone, that is, when so much great Western art is great religious art. Part of the explanation, he suggests, is that in the 19th-century religious art veered off into pious sentimentality, a failing that still dogs it. On the other hand, he respects an artist such as Hughie O'Donoghue, who has ambitiously tackled religious subjects head-on, in a contemporary way. Respects him as an intuitive painter, that is to say, but "couldn't let the symbols be so ambivalent" in his own work. That work, with its traditional religious subjects and iconography, its stylistic antecedents, does have an anachronistic quality about it. Yet it is not really anachronistic.
Admittedly, much about his distinctive mode of representation, with its oddly angular, spiky, flattened forms, recalls the highly stylised language of Romanesque and classical icon painting. But his use of colour and pattern - he employs stripes extensively - across large expanses of the picture surface could easily be seen as nudging his paintings towards abstraction in the eyes of viewers with an antipathy towards modernism. So in fact he occupies a mildly paradoxical position, open to being perceived as anachronistic from the modernist point of view and too modernist from the traditional point of view.
In person he fits the role of latter-day prophet with his grey beard and stately bearing. Even his penchant for a splash of bright colour about his person - today it's his tie - seems to reinforce the impression that he comes from the same stable of slightly eccentric visionary artists Stanley Spencer, Eric Gill and William Blake. In fact he only converted to Catholicism when he was 33 years old. He was born in Winchester in 1929. His mother, Irish and a music teacher, returned home to Dublin in 1932. Pye grew up in a household steeped in music. His mother, an agnostic, was particularly fond of Bach and Brahms. Pye himself found Bach "difficult", preferring Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert.
"I came to religion through art," he says. Always sensitive to the religious element in painting, he first encountered the work of El Greco in reproduction in books in the school library at St Columba's College, where Oisín Kelly was art teacher. He was bowled over. However, "I didn't try to paint like El Greco. I knew he was a very sophisticated painter and to try to emulate him would be beyond my powers at the time. So I tried to paint like the primitives. For years they were an influence, and I still love them, but I'm more open now to art of the Eastern Orthodox Church."
With the aid of various gifts and scholarships, including the Mainie Jellett Scholarship, he made several forays into Europe in his 20s. It was in the National Museum of Catalonia in Barcelona that he came into contact with Catalan Romanesque painting. A year spent studying stained glass at Maastricht consolidated a key skill for someone who had ecclesiastical art in mind. Painting, stained glass and etching were for many years his three major strands of art activity. He concentrates now on painting, as the substantial body of work at Jorgensen Fine Art attests.
The craft disciplines of both stained glass and etching impose specific constraints. While the same holds true for every form and medium - "All art is about limits," as Pye puts it - in painting "just about anything can happen." He starts a painting with a subject in mind. "A lot of my paintings have a long ingestion." By and large, he paints from imagination: "The imagination is a great digester of images." But he doesn't lay down an image per se on a blank canvas. Rather he starts "playing around with colour, with glazed and opaque layers of colour." It's only when something starts to emerge from the shifting balances of this process, "only when I get the particular quality of light that I want, will I go in with the image."
This explains why his paintings come across in part as lyrical arrangement of colour, and not usually naturalistic colour. The stripes, he says, "save me from having to describe things." How does that work? He smiles. "Rather than spell something out - you can dissolve it into colour."
Patrick Pye RHA, New Paintings, Jorgensen Fine Art until October 31st. Tel: 01-6619758. Patrick Pye: A retrospective of Large Etchings 1977-2003, Graphic Studio Gallery until November 8th. Tel: 01-6798021.
