Martin Gale's visual acuity in perceiving contemporary rural Ireland has made his one of the major achievements in modern Irish painting, writes Aidan Dunne.
Since the mid-1970s, Martin Gale's paintings have provided a remarkable pictorial record of the reality of contemporary rural Ireland. Where some artists might focus exclusively on the physical fabric of the landscape, for Gale it always frames the lives lived within it. Where others might seek to emphasise the persistence of tradition, downplaying evidence of modernity, he doesn't hesitate to reflect the facts of cultural change. But more than anything the particular quality of his work relates to his interest in character and narrative.
He regards his environment with a Chekhovian feeling for the shape of a story, an eye for the telling detail: "It's often the small things that give you an insight into things. You learn to look for them." He reads a lot of Irish writing. "I relate very much to writers like Dermot Healy or William Trevor." Not that his pictures are summaries of stories in an illustrative sense. As he says: "I imply a narrative, but they are not narratives in the sense of telling stories. Narrative is a difficult word with regard to painting. I think the whole thing has to do with subtlety. The possibilities are there. But certainly it's partly because I read a lot that I like a painting that has a subject matter."
It is true, as well, that practically any of his images, which often have a conclusive, iconic quality, could serve as the basis for a written narrative. "If you look at people in a gallery or a museum, they always gravitate towards paintings with people in them. I'm not crazy about the way art can become so introspective, so much about itself. A subject prevents it becoming too exclusive. My painting is not about colour, or process, it's about its general, overall subject matter, which is really the contemporary rural environment."
That encompasses his own "relatively manicured" landscape around Ballymore Eustace, and what he has termed the sparsely populated Hardlands of North Mayo, with their huge expanses of bogland.
The importance of subject matter also informs the way he paints, which is by painstakingly building up an image with layer on layer of glazes. "I think I was reacting against the painterly thing, to begin with. No brushstrokes. Just image."
The result is a heightened, hard realism. Even though it's a relatively labour-intensive way of painting, he says that: "The longest part is always getting it together in your head." He makes thumbnail sketches, takes photographs, sometimes paints water-colours. "And you spend a lot of time looking, standing around, then suddenly you get it and it comes together relatively quickly."
Apart from six years in Dublin, Gale has always lived in the country and sympathises with the point of view of rural dwellers. "I have no problem with one-off housing, for example. I don't think people should be forced to live in a Celtic theme park. The problem is one of design. But the landscape is there to be used. I distrust the conservation impulse, the nostalgia for the beautiful landscape. You won't find people who live there standing at the window looking out, they're in watching telly."
HIS MOST RECENT work addresses the dramatic impact of the developing road network on the rural environment. "They're about the NRA [National Roads Authority\], really. It's funny but the road building programme is a way of measuring one of the changes between now and 30 years ago. Then, farmers fought off efforts to build roads, now they're eager for them because of the compensation for land. The difference is that the arse has fallen out of agriculture. Rural Ireland is changing. Within 50 years it will probably be unrecognisable. Personally I'm in favour of new roads. We need them." One of the recent paintings is called simply Bypass.
It was, he remarks, the one he was working on when the issue of another kind of bypass entirely came up. In that regard, the last year has been a little more eventful than he would like. It began with a visit to the doctor. An incidental blood pressure reading meant he was immediately prescribed tablets to bring it under control. On a return visit to renew his prescription he casually asked the doctor to add "something for indigestion. I could see the alarm bells ringing before the words were even out of my mouth." He was sent for an angiogram, the results of which more or less ruled out the least invasive surgical procedure, an angioplasty. He was facing a heart bypass.
"I was thinking, well, after October would be a good time. When the exhibition is up and running. The doc just looked at me, shook his head and said: Next week." Which it was. That is less than three months ago, and Gale is in remarkably good shape and good form. He's a little surprised at how well he feels.
He was born in Worcester, England, in 1949. "In fact I was very nearly born in the stands at Wolverhampton race course." His father was a steeplechase jockey, so the family moved around a lot, and the following year they were in Ireland. "We lived all over Tipperary, Cork and Limerick and never really put down roots. Perhaps that's why I've stayed put in Ballymore Eustace (where he's lived since 1980)." Prior to that he lived in Manor Kilbride. "Because I was in Manor Kilbride I was described as a Wicklow painter, something that for some reason has stuck."
He was sent to boarding school. His maternal grandfather, who lived in Galway, was friendly with the painter Charles Lamb. "There were maybe 25 of his paintings in the house. I grew up thinking there were three really famous artists in the world: Picasso, Charles Lamb and I can't remember the third." Through all the moves, his mother retained two Lamb landscapes. "Home was wherever they were hanging."
Yet when he came to paint the landscape himself, it wasn't that tradition he turned to. The old regime was becoming increasingly embattled at the National College of Art and Design when he arrived there in the late 1960s. "I caught the tail end of McGonigal's tenure. But what impressed me was the way Pop artists had a knack for devising iconic images. So what I did didn't spring from traditional landscape painting, it came from something different. I wanted to make images. It was kind of an urban view of landscape."
IN A WAY he'd arrived at the college by accident, as a means of getting to work in the advertising department of Ranks in Phibsborough. And even when he was offered an exhibition by Bruce Arnold, who was then running the Neptune Gallery, he didn't think in terms of making a career as an artist. "One didn't, at the time. My only game plan was to keep going as long as possible and then get a proper job when I had to."
The RHA show focuses on an outstanding 10 years' work, from 1994 to 2004. But it includes a representative sampling of important older pieces as well. "For me the work breaks down into three categories. There are the semi-autobiographical paintings, from the mid-1970s to about 1990. Around about 1989 I felt I needed to stop these. They weren't coming easily, it was all getting too forced. I turned to still life as a complete change. Then, around the mid-1990s, I went back to my first affection, which is landscape."
His exhibition is strikingly consistent and coherent in its concerns and in terms of the appearance of the paintings. He is, he says, surprised at the consistency. "I always approach each painting in a completely separate way. Each one is distinct."
Yet the fact is that while the landscape per se might take second place to the figures in the semi-autobiographical paintings, it is very much there, and the psychological acuity that characterises them is also evident in the later landscapes. His landscapes are always populated, always social landscapes. The still lifes stand apart, but they do not jar, visually, at all.
Taken together, Gale's work easily amounts to one of the most impressive and important achievements in contemporary Irish painting. And the fact that it is so accessible, so user-friendly, is an important bonus.
Martin Gale, The Nissan Art Project Exhibition, is at the Royal Hibernian Academy Gallagher Gallery, Dublin, until October 24th. Telephone: 01-6612558. www.royalhibernianacademy.com