Barrie Cooke seems to have always been immersed in the natural world, be it the bogs of Ireland or tropical rainforests, writes Aidan Dunne, Art Critic
From his beginnings as an artist up to the present, Barrie Cooke's work offers us joltingly immediate and compellingly accurate accounts of aspects of the natural world. It seems as if he is always immersed in nature, thoroughly at home in a wet, messy, rural space, a space increasingly remote from the experience of an urbanised, technological Ireland. Immensely sensate and sharp, his paintings remind us of what we really are. It's hard to see them without receiving an intimation of what it is to be intensely alive, and of how close in nature life is to death.
For, given their incredible vitality, there is a great deal of death in the paintings: the crumpled bodies of game animals, livid, dissected sheep carcasses, bones from the butcher's shop, the remains of human beings preserved deep in peat bogs, the insidious, fatal beauty of Phytopthera Infestans, the fungus that devastated the Irish potato crops in the 1840s, or the poisoned Irish lakes and rivers, depopulated of fish.
Death, change and decay are built into the natural world. And though the natural world is at the heart of Cooke's work, at the same time it has been subject to unprecedented pressure. On a practical level, pollution, deforestation, agribusiness, fish-farming and over-exploitation of resources all threaten the persistence of nature on local and global scales. Often the mere survival of what we think of as "natural" depends on a degree of intervention and management that contradicts the very term.
Meanwhile, on the level of theoretical discourse, nature has been similarly besieged and its autonomy eroded. Rather than having a clear, distinct status, it is viewed as a cultural construct, and as such only available to us in terms of a culturally determined framework of meaning.
In his work, Cooke has consistently been alert to these and related issues. The question of our relationship to nature, and our position within or apart from nature, is absolutely integral to his output. From the mid-1980s, he has directly addressed the facts of environmental pollution, with an eye to the inland waterways with which he is intimately familiar through habitation, work and angling, and in wider contexts.
While his view of nature is in sympathy with artistic and intellectual traditions as diverse as Chinese nature poetry and Pre-Socratic philosophy, it is also informed by the world view generated by the natural sciences within the space of the last few hundred years. Most importantly, though, he is, and has been for all his adult life, a country dweller, and he is a very keen fisherman. Both facts might be of only incidental interest but they have substantially informed his attitude to his environment and been consistently significant in relation to his work.
They help to explain, for example, how he instinctively inclined towards a conception of the natural world as dynamic, with a lively, ongoing interchange between organisms and environment. Rather than trying to pin down a fixed, immutable reality, his work consistently tries to grasp a sense of nature as process. And more than anything else, in his work it is water that literally and metaphorically represents the natural flux. Here, perhaps, his experiences as artist and fisherman are mutually interactive.
English by birth, largely brought up and educated in Bermuda and the US, an Irish artist by virtue of his residence here since the mid-1950s, he is not, in his work, interested in cultural identity or cultural readings of the landscape. The specifics of place are paramount for him, not because they relate to chronicles of human history but because of the primacy of the physical facts. He is instinctively drawn to certain organically charged environments, including The Burren, in Co Clare, to particular lakes and rivers, to peat bogs and tropical rainforest.
It's hardly accidental that a connoisseur of lush, saturated environments should settle in Ireland. So central and pervasive is water in his work that it's not facetious to suggest that watercolour should be his natural medium, and to some extent it is. He makes beautiful watercolours, but generally what he has done is to treat oil paint like a form of watercolour, more often than not painting in exceptionally thin, diluted glazes, a technique that has often aroused comment.
His artistic approach was tempered and developed through his long relationship with the Dutch artist, Sonja Landweer, who he met first in 1956. Through her, he came into contact with the theories of Rudolf Steiner. While Steiner's Christian mysticism did not make any noticeable impression, his thinking on the natural world, hinging on the underlying unity of all living things, has been an important influence.
In 1965 a disciple of Steiner, Theodor Schwenck, produced a remarkable book,Sensitive Chaos, which looks at the role of water and flowing processes throughout a staggering range of natural phenomena.
One of his impressively well-documented assertions was that varieties of a spiral or vortex template are written into a huge range of generative processes in nature. But apart from, as one might expect, considering the complex patterns that attends the circulation of ocean currents, or the progress of a river, or indeed clouds in the sky, Schwenck extended his observations into such areas as human anatomy.
He points out, for example, that the growth of our bones accords with patterns of flow that proceed without apparent interruption across articular joints. Schwenck was first and foremost an observer rather than a theoretician, but he does put forward the ecological idea that the Earth is one vast organic network rather than an inanimate backdrop populated by discrete organisms.
For Cooke, his work on the ubiquity of flowing patterns, their central role in the generation and growth of organic form, was a vital insight, confirming his own instinctive feeling that there is a continuity between form and process in nature. The plant or the sensate animal is a concentrated reflection of the environment that shapes it and endows it with transient substance. The world is not a blank, undifferentiated nothing because we are a focused product of its character and processes. We do not so much speak its language, it's more that we and other living things are its language.
In the mid-1970s, Cooke visited the rainforest in Borneo. As an organically charged environment, the rainforest is pre-eminent. Its hot, wet, dark spaces are crammed with a jostling profusion of life in myriad forms. In his work he treats it as a heightened, privileged, eroticised space, but rather than being reducible to any single subject or aspect, what is special about it is the teeming generality of its processes, its endless dance of life and death. All this is encapsulated in a pattern, Schwenck's generative vortex. We are drawn inexorably into nature's Slow Dance. This theme is elaborated throughout a magnificent series of paintings and paintings with boxes that delight in the limitless morphological inventiveness of organic process.
But some years on the vortex reappears in a more ominous context, in Algal Growth, a strikingly beautiful painting about an environmentally destructive phenomenon, the runaway growth of algae, a process that fundamentally alters habitat. Several paintings detail its invasion of the lake on Cooke's doorstep, Lough Arrow, in Co Sligo. An unusually grim series of drawings pronounce the death of the lake.
Increasingly, from the late 1980s, there is an odd doubling effect in Cooke's production of paintings. It coincides with a pattern of regular fishing trips to New Zealand and, to a lesser extent, the US. It is almost as if he produces two symmetrically opposed bodies of work. At its most direct, this can be seen in the contrast between his treatment of the relatively unspoilt environment of New Zealand and that of the polluted waters of Ireland.
The spaciousness, freshness and sparkle of the mountains, forests, rivers and lakes of New Zealand make a stark contrast with the closed and poisoned lakes and rivers of inland Ireland, where sewage and excessive agricultural nutrients and by-products are fundamentally changing the nature of the rural environment. While Phyopthera Infestans relates specifically to the disastrous destruction of the potato crops that led to The Famine, its dark mood extends to other accounts of environmental calamity in present-day Ireland. The pollution paintings are in a sense anti-landscapes, chronicling what may turn out to be the decisive degradation of once healthy ecosystems. As paintings they challenge landscape conventions, but then Cooke has never adhered to the conventions of landscape painting.
Conversely, some of his most recent paintings, the Godbeams, are unabashedly romantic and affirmative. They are views of skies, inspired by shafts of sunlight cutting through the clouds above the mountains in south Mayo. They suggest that, despite all the reversals, the local landscape is still very much alive with meaning.
Nissan Art Project: Barrie Cooke runs at The RHA Gallery, Ely Place, Dublin, until September 30th. Telephone 01-6612558