IT HAS been a gradual, unobtrusive progression. There have been no public statements no drama, no questioning above all no affectation. He has no manifesto. Although Sean McSweeney quickly found an audience his transition from instinctive, gifted, painter to major artist has been a quiet one. It is an intensely physical living art dominated by colour often daring, risk taking, rule bending colour as well as texture, internal rhythms and energy.
Emotion in McSweeney's pictures is served by its evocation of the memory of the moment. His work exudes the image of the moment, not long term nostalgia. As his latest exhibition, currently showing at the RHA Gallagher Gallery in Dublin with Conor Fallon's sculpture, testifies, McSweeney has moved on to large scale works with an ease and maturity. The show marks an important turning point for him. "It was a challenge, working to that space. You become conscious of the physical thing of just covering a large canvas trying to keep the paint moving. Yes it is a transitional show. I will go on tackling large pieces."
McSweeney's studio, which is about 300 metres from his home in Co Sligo, is the former Ballyconnell National school house. His mother had attended it as a child. "In those days it was divided into two the boys on one side and the girls on the other. It was very strict. They weren't even allowed to play together." He points to the marks on the floor where the desks used to be screwed down into place.
It is a large, bright studio, organised, surprisingly tidy. But then McSweeney is deceptively orderly. As relaxed and yet deliberate as is his work. He moved to County Sligo about 12 years ago having previously settled in County Wicklow, where he and his family had lived for 17 years on leaving Dublin.
FOR all its life, urgency and diversity McSweeney's impressionistic landscapes of Sligo have cent red on a shoreline bogland area extending little more than six miles beyond his home. "There is so much to see. The landscape here is inexhaustible. This patch of Sligo is giving me freedom." While he has done work at Lissadell.
Shoreline, Lissadell is included in the current show and is interested in doing more, work there, "I'd like to do the seasons at Lissadell, I like the trees contrasted against the background of the shore and sky there. Also, there's the idea of looking from a dark area out on to a brighter one" and he mentions being interested in working in the Burren landscape and also in his father's native Meath, he stresses "there's enough here to help me make work."
The almost scientific intensity of his focus explains why he is not a regional painter. His reading of the landscape is so exact that it too specialist to be considered regionalist. "If Sligo people were to see my pictures in the States, they would never think, `ah, yes that's Sligo' I know that. It's only when you leave the road and walk across the fields that you discover a new landscape." The landscape in County Wicklow, he says, with its trees and mountains, is standing up, "here it is a different perspective, it's lying down. It often cuts the sky out. Here we are looking into this bog pool. Looking down." Exploring the bogs is exciting. "I think of the spongy sort of plants, and then try and arrive, at that texture."
Even as we stand looking down into it, the surface of the bog pool is constantly changing. "I imagine I am a bird flying over the landscape, looking down, watching. The bog is a big, wild garden. The plant life is amazing. I watch the bog bean, the bog cotton, the ragged robin, the yellow irises, the orchids. And of course it is always moving, changing with the weather as well as the seasons. I think it is the texture of the plant, life that triggers off a painting. Colour, he says, is something you take away with you.
AT 61 he remains a robust, physical, slow moving man with clear grey blue eyes. Pointing to the velvet tipped bull rushes and bog beans, his thoughtful, wondering, at times dreamy gaze contrasts with the exactness of the way he actually observes. Gentle, quiet spoken, stubborn and enthusiastic, he has a precise approach towards describing the things he sees and the work he does. Definite without being dogmatic. Still very much a Dubliner, yet one born with a countryman's special understanding of the landscape he is living and working in, the one he has, returned to.
"We spent all our holidays up here as kids. I remember we used to be screaming and crying on the train when it was time to go back to Dublin." He seems personally content. It is his curiosity which sends him roaming over the landscape. That and his absolute, belief in the power and mystery of landscape. In common with Irish writers, Irish painters do tend to relegate landscape to backdrop. But it is central. I want to make a statement about this area. You are always seeing something new. And it goes so quick. If you were to leave it for a month, that pool will change. I know it is possible to live somewhere else and come to a place and paint, but I prefer living in it." Referring to the brief time he lived in Spain, he says There I was and I found myself asking why am I painting this landscape, these trees, what do they personally mean to me?
Although he is self taught McSweeney knew from an early age he wanted to be an artist. "I was no good at school, I had no interest. But my father had been a good painter." His father died in an accident when Sean was five. "I finished some of his pictures. I knew I wanted to paint and everything I did, all the bits and pieces of jobs, were done to help make that possible." McSweeney later attended life drawing classes at the NCAD at night. I do think that the only way you can learn to paint is by looking at paintings." He speaks about the early impact Paul Henry and Emile Nolde had on him.
For much of his career, he has been compared with Jack B Yeats in terms of technique rather than subject McSweeney has never been drawn to figurative painting. "He was a huge influence on me in the beginning, but not so much now. I admire that whole American school of Abstract expressionists, Rothko and de Kooning, Rothko in particular and also Francis Bacon and Frank Auerbach."
Colour is vital to McSweeney. If the colour went, I could give up painting. Colour is all. The rules are there yet the rules can be broken. If I see a green painting then it's green. If I see a yellow painting, it is yellow it has to be yellow." Often applying paint directly to the canvas, he rarely uses a palette. For him, the canvas replaces it. "I put the paint straight on to the canvas, squeeze it directly from the tube and then work it in with a knife, a brush and from time to time, even with my hands. The aim is to kill the white of the canvas. I cover the canvas completely, maybe with blue, maybe a red, maybe an ochre. Now I have a ground to work into, working in a field of paint. One of the many mysteries about colour is that it often cannot be repeated. It's the discovery and magic of getting a combination that may not be repeated. The elusiveness of colour for him in particular the essence of, art.
Notebooks and sketch pads full of the charcoal drawings and sketches he makes while walking the bogland are stacked in piles back at the studio. They provide both a working reference library and record of his approach to his, art. "The sketch pad is the beginning. I never paint outdoors. I'd pollute the environment, the way I use paint... I'd spend half time cleaning the paint off everything.
Even if I wanted to, it would be difficult to paint outdoors here (in Ireland), there isn't the climate for it. But I could fill a notebook in a day, just walking around, looking. You see the light on a field, the movement of it."
THE sea is calm. A hawk darts across the washed grey sky. Beyond the bog, Ben Bulben and Knocknarea share the skyline. "I haven't painted Ben Bulben yet, I think I'm scared." Even on a still day, the Ballyconnell landscape bears the mark of the powerful influence the elements play in shaping it. He, points to a large heap of stones which appear to have been gathered for a purpose. "No no, the sea" just tossed them here. It is difficult to believe on a day like this just how vicious the storms can be." In an explosion of wings, a heron rises spectacularly from previously still reeds. McSweeney is probably equally struck by the movement of the disturbed vegetation, yet he notes every bird. He paints quickly. "But it is a process of covering a surface with paint and then working it, taking the paint off, putting the paint on. I must work wet into wet. I do paint quickly, a picture may be made in one sitting." Structure is his reason for often scratching in a border. He explains the need for form, shape, a natural frame and stresses the importance of a border around a painting, just as a pond has an edge.
And his motivation and approach always gravitate towards the central importance of risk "I don't want to settle down to the same pattern. I like taking risks, this landscape offers endless possibilities and so does colour."
