'The sheer sexiness of oil paint is extraordinary'

After two decades as a printmaker, Stephen Lawlor’s says his first paintings were ‘abysmal’ – but now he’s hit a creative seam

STEPHEN Lawlor’s exhibition at the Oliver Sears Gallery is called simply Cu and Recent Paintings – Cu being the chemical symbol for copper. Many of the paintings in the show take as their starting point the distinctive landscapes of disused copper mines. The mines were located on opposite sides of the Irish Sea, at Amlwch in Wales and at Avoca in Co Wicklow. The seam that links them runs beneath the seabed in between.

Lawlor arrived at Amlwch thanks to an environmental project organized by Dr Aidan Doyle, an artist and sociologist based at Newcastle University. “He invited several artists to come and look at the landscape. I was actually sceptical at first. I didn’t think I’d gain anything from looking at a mine.” The “mine” turned out to be the aftermath of the mine, a vast swathe of landscape, “a huge hole in the ground occupied by the spoil-heaps”. The pulverized and roasted rock in the spoil-heaps has weathered and oxidized, releasing a wealth of natural colours: “including an amazing range of ochres and pinks.” It’s a manmade landscape that is visually extraordinary and also a repository of geological and human history. Shortly afterwards, Lawlor went to visit the corresponding site in Avoca. He was dismayed to find that only a fraction of it survives.

The bulk of the rest has been used, unwisely he points out, for landfill. Cynical political calculation, he believes, lies behind the failure to face up to the local environmental issues. There are European conventions in place designed to protect such geological heritage sites, Doyle says, but despite them, even now, with the Green Party in government, the residues of “the Avoca mines are a threatened landscape”. In 2008 Lawlor’s Hillsboro gallery show featured paintings inspired by the landscapes of three Dublin rivers, the Tolka, the Liffey and the Dodder. What appealed to him about the rivers, he explains, is that you look at the surface of the water and the landscape is immediately transformed and abstracted. He likes the way the images become ambiguous and multi-layered. When he looked at the copper mining landscape it immediately struck him that it too “was already visually abstracted”. The paintings have a molten, fluid quality about them, and rich, textured surfaces.

Until quite recently, Lawlor, a Dubliner, was best known as a printmaker. In fact he graduated from NCAD and began his career as a printmaker in 1983. He quickly established himself as a technically accomplished artist. He explored motifs from classical art in a reflective, measured way. Then, in 1996, he first started to paint. “The results were abysmal,” he says candidly. But he persevered. As he notes, there’s a funny dividing line between painters and printmakers, a never-the-twain-shall-meet attitude. Painters often make prints with the assistance of master-printers, but the notion of printmakers painting is regarded with some suspicion.

In part, that’s because printmakers have a reputation for becoming hung-up on technique, for the simple reason that, if you mess up on technique, you’ll ruin the print. You’ve more leeway with paint. “Printmaking,” says Lawlor, “is about 20 per cent making art and 80 per cent technical stuff. Painting reverses those proportions.” In fact, the versatility of oil paint is disconcerting: “The freedom can paralyse you. For about five years my painting was very tentative, then suddenly it began to feel right.” Now, he notes: “The sheer sexiness of oil paint is extraordinary.” Since 2004 he’s devoted himself fulltime to his own work as both painter and printmaker. “You know the way British naval officers used to do 20 years before the mast before they were put in charge of a ship? I think of my previous 20 years printmaking like that, a long apprenticeship.” Editioning prints, he says, is an exacting physical occupation. “It literally wears you out.”

His painting experience has already influenced his printmaking, as his recent show at the Graphic Studio Gallery, Solmyra, demonstrated. The etchings, lithographs, silkscreens and monoprints, made with greater range and freedom than his established style of printmaking, arose from a residency at Galleri Astley Arts Centre in Sweden earlier this year. “It’s situated in dense woodland in a huge forest (the show’s title is the geographical location). You just don’t come across anyone there.” It was fantastically productive, not least because “the director there is an ex-army guy. He’d knock at my door at seven every morning and say, come on, we’re off to draw in the forest.” He enjoyed working outdoors. “It does something to you. You want to bring that immediacy back to the studio with you. I’ve always admired Constable’s outdoor sketches – they have that quality of really being there, out in the open.” He is quite happy to straddle the border between abstraction and representation, not really seeing it as a border. He works mostly from enlarged details of his own digital photographs. “I’ll take 200 photographs and one of them will have something I can use, and the funny thing is I’ll know as soon as I take it that it’s the one, it’s the jumping-off point.”

Cu and Recent Paintings, Oliver Sears Gallery, 29 Molesworth St, Dublin. Until October 14