CHARLES Cullen (born 1939) has a special niche in the estimation of many Irish contemporaries, and is also a respected teacher. Otherwise, he does not have what is called a "high profile"; solo exhibitions by him are relatively rare, and in any case he is one of those artists who, somehow or other, rarely seem to do themselves proper justice in one man shows. His work needs careful culling and it also demands a certain emotional or temperamental sympathy with his often edgy, quasi Expressionist style. This for the most part, it has not received.
He belongs to the generation roughly identified with the original Project Gallery and the Independent Artists - which includes Michael Kane, John Behan, John Kelly, Brian Bourke, James McKenna, etc. It was a rebellious generation, even an angry one - firstly in conflict with the hardline academic teaching at the NCAD of the time, and secondly in reaction against the kind of work promulgated by the Living Art Exhibitions. This tended either to be French derived in a slightly provincial way, or else coolly formalist and neither of these alternatives offered Cullen and his contemporaries any obvious models or signposts.
Their approach was more subjective and personalised which explains why several of them were drawn to Continental Expressionism, and why others found Francis Bacon an eye opener. Abstraction, in general, was not their thing. They wanted an emotional, psychological, self probing element in their work, and a sense of immediate impact, which expressed the inner and outer conflicts (and sometimes frustrations) of being Irish at that particular era. Their style was often deliberately raw, and it could even be clumsy or jejune; but they broke moulds, wrenched Irish art away from its polite, suburban garden tone and gave it a new emotional (and sometimes social) urgency and impact.
As Brian Lynch says in his catalogue essay, Cullen appears to consider himself a draughtsman rather than a painter, but is nevertheless an individual colourist. Purely as a draughtsman, he is often outstanding, and in that has much in common with Patrick Graham. The catalogue mentions George Grosz, and it could even have brought in Egon Schiele, though there is also a spoofish, 1960s tone in some of Cullen's work which links him with Hockney and Blake.
Though this is a retrospective, it contains relatively little early work and concentrates on Cullen's output over the last decade and a half. Many or most of the exhibits are in mixed media on paper, and among other things they demonstrate Cullen's special strengths as a portraitist and self portraitist. It has obviously been selected with care - Cullen, after all, is rather an uneven artist - and the recent pictures, in particular, show an artist draughtsman of genuine imaginative energy whose edges have certainly not been blunted by middle age.
