Painting the darkness of the deep

VISUAL ART:The sea is full of conflict, mortal risk and menace, never reassuring or comforting, in Hughie O'Donoghue's Sea Pictures

Sea Pictures– Hughie O'Donoghue

SeaChange– Helen Gaynor

Wexford Arts Centre, Until Nov 1st

Two sea-themed exhibitions are at the Wexford Arts Centre throughout the Opera Festiva. It’s a bold, even curious duplication, but one that works, just about, largely because of the divergent character of the paintings by the two artists, Hughie O’Donoghue in the main space, and Helen Gaynor in Gallery II.

O'Donoghue, who has concurrent exhibitions at Leeds Art Gallery and the James Hyman Gallery in London, shows more than paintings. His sea pictures, which give his show its title, are made up of painted collages, and he also includes a set of carborundum prints of the wreck of the Plassey, grounded on Inisheer (commissioned by Behaviour & Attitudes), as well as two large paintings, including a new one, Constance.

Strangely enough, while his exhibition schedule is nothing less than punishing, O’Donoghue is an artist whose work is slow and meditative. One gets the distinct feeling that what eventually surfaces and makes its way onto the gallery walls emerges from periods of lengthy reflection on the part of an inwardly focused, somewhat melancholy sensibility. He is also, though, a process-oriented artist, and it would be wrong to think that everything is worked out in advance and assembled according to a strict plan. It is almost as if the muted, finely textured images that we see have been excavated from densely packed strata of pigment, and in fact the unearthing of memory, the recovery of a past that is at risk of being forgotten and discarded, is close to the heart of his concerns.

Sea Picturescombines new and past work, appropriately because the sea has featured recurrently in many ways in his oeuvre to date.

The crossing of the Irish Sea was a symbolic as well as an actual journey for Irish emigrants, including the artist’s forebears, leaving to work and live in England. O’Donoghue’s father, Daniel, was part of the British Expeditionary Force that was evacuated from Europe in 1940, returning across the “Narrow Seas” that have played such a strategic role in relations between Britain and Europe.

One sequence of paintings, which informs this exhibition but is not itself included, deals with the terrible fate of thousands of those aboard the Lancastriawhen it was bombed by German planes during the evacuation from St Nazaire at the time. As the ship was crammed with refugees, including troops and civilians, when it sank, there is no definitive account of the number of people who perished. Those trying to escape jumped into oil-covered water, where they became coated with oil themselves. Many were then machine gunned by the attacking aircraft. This terrible incident, but one element in a tapestry of horrors at that time, is in O'Donoghue's treatment hellishly emblematic.

The various strands that make up Sea Picturesare not as narratively specific, though there are repeated references to conflict and mortal risk, and the overall impression of the sea that is conveyed is by no means reassuring or comforting. O'Donoghue has increasingly incorporated items from personal archives in his paintings as a means of bearing witness to the particularity of individual experience when set against the impersonal sweep of grand historical narratives, and the accompanying note to this exhibition indicates that many of the documentary images are drawn from the old photograph album of a former seafarer. He has also long incorporated photographs as documents, seamlessly woven into the skin of the paintings.

As with Elgar’s song-cycle of the same name, his intention is not to tell a single story but to “build up a mood or an overall image”. Elgar’s songs are settings of poems by five different writers. The cycle develops an overall consistency as it goes along, but each song also has its own distinct character. O’Donoghue is not illustrating Elgar in any sense, though the tone of music and words does find an occasional echo in his work. For example, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s lines “The ship went on with solemn face/ To meet the darkness on the deep” does chime with the sense of foreboding that attends many of his images.

In the picture of the sea that he builds up, one is never quite alone, communing with nature. Rather it's about tonnages and charts, calculating odds and taking your chances. One trio of paintings, actually a precursor of the more numerous constituents of the title piece, is especially ominous, sketching out a tale of pursuit and evasion, hunter and hunted. Secret of the Submarine, Converging Pathsand Dueldemarcate the sea as an arena of conflict. There's a pervasive atmosphere of menace and unease to these pieces, though we never learn exactly what happens.

As O'Donoghue notes: "The denouement of the story is now lost to memory". Plumes of smoke, shifts of viewpoint encompassing a submarine prowling the sea surface and aerial reconnaissance photographs, all contribute to "the story" that is hinted at, that actually refers to a generality of experience, much of which is indeed lost with the lives of those who perished. And then, in the midst of the sea pictures one comes across the image of a black-and-white postcard collaged onto a surface. The piece is called This is My Store, which is the handwritten annotation on the card, with a line indicating one among a cluster of seafront buildings in a view of the harbour town of Stromness in the Orkney Islands. There's something moving about this card with its simple message hinting at another story, with the vast, implicit presence of the sea.

The large new painting Constanceincludes a submerged female figure. It's a peaceful, dreamy image, and we are left to draw our own conclusions about the fate of the young woman. The title alludes to Albert Pinkham Ryder's late-19th-century work, inspired by one of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, in which Constance and her infant son are cast treacherously adrift in an open boat without sail or rudder. Her innate goodness and faith miraculously ensure their survival.

Neither in this nor in his other large painting, Flanders and the Narrow Seas, in which it is a male figure who is cast adrift, does O'Donoghue promise so happy an ending. But the point is that the story is told, that the artist bears witness to the experiences of those who would otherwise be forgotten. The show is, overall, beautiful and elegiac.

IN GALLERY II, SeaChangedoes represent something of a sea change for Helena Gaynor. To say that she has previously been best known as a highly accomplished decorative painter is not to disparage her at all. You could, after all, say the same thing about David Hockney. But apparently a stay at Cill Rialaig in 2008 encouraged her to reassess the direction of her work. It was, in fact, the experience of looking at the sea every day that prompted a rethink. She moved away from her tightly organised, square-formatted compositions and opened out the picture space.

The largest, multi-panel piece, Reflection, recalls Hockney's bold attempts to depict the moving surface of a pool of water. Gaynor employs minimal means with great flair in a terrifically mobile evocation of a rippled surface.

Elsewhere, she maps out water, land and sky with successive colour planes. The decisive difference between this and her previous work is her current concentration on space, light and atmosphere rather than objects within the space. There is the excitement of real discovery to most of the paintings on view, and the layout and installation of her show is outstanding.