On the outside looking in

GALWAY ARTS FESTIVAL:Brian Bourke's 'readiness to unnerve, amuse and taunt', as Seamus Heaney put it, is part of what has made him one of the country's leading artists. It goes hand in hand with a sombre edge, as is clear from three shows of his work in the west

HE’S ONE OF the leading artists in the country, and the quality of his work is acknowledged by peers, collectors and art historians, yet Brian Bourke remains something of an outsider. That’s because he is, by nature, a bit of an outsider. As Seamus Heaney wrote of him: “There is a strong impulse towards confrontation, a readiness to unnerve, amuse and taunt. It can almost seem as if this artist is more bent upon engaging the audience than he is absorbed in the image.”

Stocky of build, quick-witted and occasionally truculent of character, Bourke is someone who, to borrow Groucho Marx’s line, wouldn’t belong to the kind of club that would accept him as a member. Born in Dublin in 1936, he attended two art schools but took to neither of them. For most of his working life he has been based in Connemara. He resigned from the Independent Artists group when it began to dictate what its members could and couldn’t exhibit. He’s an associate member of the RHA, but he bristles at the rule that restricts associates to just one work in the annual exhibition. So one year, he says, he made a point of submitting a piece that consisted of a huge number of composite panels.

That was a group of works on paper based on William Blake’s life mask, and it’s included in his compendious Galway exhibition, Polyptych, at the Fairgreen Festival Gallery. “I was reading Blake at the time – idealistic, visionary stuff, amazing.” The cast of Blake’s face was taken in 1823 by the sculptor James Deville, Bourke explains. Francis Bacon owned a copy and did a celebrated series of paintings from it. Samuel Beckett owned a painting of the mask, Bourke says, that in his view – he scrunches up his face – wasn’t very good.

His own coloured drawings based on the mask are superb. There's no question but that his primary strength is as a draughtsman of great vivacity, boldness and acuity. Even his paintings are firmly underpinned by drawing. Polyptych is one of three shows of his work on view in the west. Animal and portrait works on paper make up Master Drawings, at the Norman Villa Gallery, in Salthill; Winterscapes, at the Claremorris Gallery, in Co Mayo, features recent landscapes. There's also a handsome book, Brian Bourke: Five Decades 1960s-2000s(Lilliput Press), a richly illustrated retrospective between covers that gathers together various texts written about him over the years.

“When the [Galway Arts] Festival approached me I immediately thought of the polyptychs,” Bourke says. In 1998 he held a show at the RHA Gallagher Gallery entitled Dip-Trip-Quadrip-Pentap-Polyp-Tych. It brought into focus his penchant for making myriad versions of a single subject, capable of yielding huge multipanel displays. “But,” he says, “it’s very difficult to show them that way.” Unless you have a museum-scale space at your disposal, that is. In Galway he does. “But it’s not a retrospective,” he cautions, frowning in a way that makes it clear he doesn’t care much for retrospectives.

Two of his fictional, pictorial alter egos feature in the show: Mad Sweeney and Don Quixote. The bawdy picaresque is a mode that suits him down to the ground. It was, he says, Robert Graves's writing on Sweeney in The White Goddessthat drew him to that character. Heaney's version of the Buile Shuibhne, the medieval Sweeney epic, has become the standard translation, and it echoes Graves's interpretation of the story as, in Heaney's words, "a quarrel between the free, creative imagination and the constraints of religious, political and domestic obligations". One can immediately see which side Bourke is on in that particular quarrel.

One expansive wall is filled with his images of Women Giving Birth to Men, made at a stage of his life when he felt dominated by his own role in gendered domesticity. It could be seen as misogynist, but at heart it isn't. Still: "Really," he sighs, "it was a rant. And when you rant, then at some point you stop ranting, and it's over." In Bourke's defence, he has consistently been a sensitive, loving, respectful observer of the feminine in his work – as well as, and sometimes simultaneously, an admiring, lustful observer of women.

Indeed, most of his portraits are of women, including the most recent, made during a residency at the RHA in Dublin. His animal drawings at the Norman Villa Gallery, whether of horses and bulls in his immediate vicinity or elephants and other beasts from Circo Florilegio during its visit to Ireland in the 1990s, are terrific. But his favourite subjects are, he says, newborn babies. “I do an enormous number of drawings of babies. Whenever I can. With the steam coming off them, straight out of the womb. I never charge for a drawing of a newborn baby.” He pauses. “They don’t have any money.”

There's also a dark, sombre edge to his vision that has often been commented on, an awareness of mortality. Even his liveliest portrait drawings seem to search for the skull beneath the skin. More directly, Nature Morteconsists of multiple views of a goat skull, horns intact. It came, he says, from a limestone landscape that is home to a herd of wild goats – "fantastic creatures" – and his work is a monument to them and what they symbolise. One of the most recent pieces in the show depicts the body of a fox caught in the fork of a tree. "I've a son who lives over on the Shannon. I was over there after the floods last winter, and we went for a walk and came upon this fox. It had obviously climbed the tree to escape the water, then got trapped." He shakes his head. "A crucified fox."

Brian Bourke: Polyptych is at the Fairgreen Festival Gallery, Fairgreen Road, Galway until July 25th; galwayartsfestival.com