Visual Arts: Reviewed: Mary Donnelly: Textures Of Memory, Hallward Gallery, Dublin, until tomorrow (01-6621482). J. B. Vallely: Drawings, Davis Gallery, Dublin, through December (01-8726969). Frank Phelan, Arthouse, Dublin, run ended.
In Textures Of Memory things come right for Mary Donnelly. Her aims seem in perfect accord with her means in her series of muted, textural landscape paintings. They are physically dense, material pieces, but they are also formally restrained, very much in keeping with the character of an ancient, sparsely populated rural environment, subject to the elements and, almost by the way, exceptionally beautiful.
Donnelly builds up the surfaces in layers, generating gritty textures with powdered stone, fossils and sand. Rough, irregular borders and hollows and gashes cut into the surface add to the effect. She works colour into the mix but never overstates it. It's as if the colour has been laid on and then, appropriately enough, bleached out by the weather, making for great light and atmosphere.
The evocation by these means of tenuous human habitation in a hard, timeless land recalls the work of Maria Simonds-Gooding, though Donnelly has her own distinctive voice and is perhaps more romantically inclined in her view of the landscape.
Like Simonds-Gooding she adopts unconventional viewpoints. She likes expansive, swooping views - one is tempted to say bird's-eye views - which, even at their most dramatic, don't seem unduly contrived or obtrusive.
This is not to say that she distances us from the land. On the contrary, she seems to be aiming for a paradoxical effect, trying to both draw us close to the immediate, earthy textures and impart a sense of the wider world. And she succeeds.
There are one or two question marks. Her penchant for tacking the pictures to their supports with nails quickly comes to seem like a mannerism, but that's a relatively minor quibble in relation to an impressive achievement.
For little over a week the ground-floor exhibition space of the erstwhile Arthouse, in Temple Bar, was occupied by an exhibition of paintings. It's not, to put it mildly, an ideal venue for paintings, but the painter involved, Frank Phelan, came with an intriguing biography as outlined in an accompanying, generously illustrated catalogue.
The name is new to me, but Phelan's documented track record weaves him, Zelig-like, into a major strand of Irish 20th-century art history.
Born in Dublin in 1932, he started to study architecture - his father was an architect - but moved to Canada and switched to art. In the late 1950s he moved back across the Atlantic to Ireland, then to London, and from there found his way to the arts colony of St Ives, in Cornwall. There, apparently, he encountered Nancy Wynne-Jones, befriended Tony O'Malley and, through him, met Patrick Heron and Bryan Wynter. His experience of St Ives strengthened his resolve to be a painter.
Back in London he worked from a studio in Chelsea and was given his first solo show by the dynamic Richard Demarco, in Edinburgh.
Then, however, he stopped painting in favour of other activities, and he didn't return to it until the latter 1980s. Since the turn of the century he has been exhibiting regularly.
While his paintings have titles that point to narrative and other subjects, he remarks that these elements are "an invitation to enter the painting" but that the work is, in the end, abstract.
The earliest paintings included in the Arthouse show dated from 1967. While they are noticeably different from Phelan's more recent work, they share with it a curiously diffident, tentative quality. An extreme way of putting this might be to say that each painting outlines an argument but holds back from resolving it.
There is more than one way of making a painting, and often less is more, but for this observer, at any rate, there is a consistent feeling that Phelan stops short of working things through, with the result that his paintings, whatever their strengths, have a cursory quality. They broach areas of concern in an informed, highly literate way but somehow hold back from committed, perhaps risky engagement.
This may sound harsh, particularly given his clear ability and level of competence. He has a feeling for space, for colour, for the rhythmic dynamics of composition. Although several St Ives painters are cited as exemplars, there are echoes of others as well, including, oddly enough, Francis Bacon. Judged against the highest standards, if the overall feeling is of something dispersed or not quite there yet, there is also real potential.
John B. Vallely is well known for his vivid evocations of traditional musicians and athletes in action. His drawings at the Davis Gallery are in that sense more of the same. Musicians solo and in groups, massed ranks of racing cyclists and other sportsmen: all seem transported with the same passionate involvement. In fact it is a passion that Vallely, who is also a musician, aims to not so much depict as embody in his way of working.
His way of using paint, and his palette, often recall the later Jack B. Yeats. Here, using ink in black and white wash, and occasionally colour, his means are more limited, but the same qualities come through: spontaneity, a total commitment to the moment, a justified faith in his ability to capture in a still image something fleeting. There is a tremendous sense of life in his work.
