Renders the Immediate
ImmutableLandscape painting has a long and rich history in Ireland, which should not be surprising given the beauty of the verdant beauty of the Irish landscape. And it is this tradition to which the work of Ursula Boylan O'Gara, a contemporary artist born in Dublin, so clearly belongs, on the evidence of her recent exhibition at Montserrat Gallery, 584 Broadway, in Soho.
Indeed, O'Gara's crystalline technique calls to mind that of her fellow Dubliner William Davis, an important nineteenth century landscape painter who eventually relocated to Liverpool, England - but not before painting his beautiful "Junction of the Liffey and Rye, Near Leixlip" among other memorable Irish Landscapes. Like Davis, O'Gara is a superb colorist with a knack for capturing precise qualities of light at different times of day, capturing atmospheric nuances by virtue of her ability to combine luminous hues in such a way as to convey the less tangible as well as the more prominent facets of nature.
Contemplating
O'Gara's marinescape "Galway Hookers," for one
splendid example, one can almost
feel the delicate breezes waving over the water and activating the sails of the
small boats under the delicate blue sky with its wispy bits of cloud. This
ability to surrender completely to the scene at hand, subjugating one's
stylistic impulses to its particulars, rather than imposing a self conscious
aesthetic agenda on the picture, is what distinguishes the best Irish landscape
painters such as Joseph William Carey and Edwin Hayes, among others to whose
long- standing tradition O'Gara now adds her own distinctive vision. O'Gara's
coloristic clarity and self-effacing style are especially effective in paintings
such as
"Glenmalure,"
with its rocky coastline and sparkling body of water giving way to a distant
vista of misty blue mountains, each element in the composition meticulously
delineated in regard to its unique tonalities and textures.
Yet while O'Gara is a painter of admirable restraint, eschewing needless flourishes in favor of accurate depiction of her subjects, she nonetheless graces her pictures with subtle evidence of her singular artistic sensibility. She accomplishes this by virtue of her unique painterly alchemy, an amalgam of chromatic luminosity and sensitive brushwork that produces effects unlike those of any other contemporary painter whose name springs immediately to mind.
Her ability to
invest even innately picturesque subjects with a sense of freshness and
immediacy can be seen in pictures such as "Inishgort Lighthouse"
and
"West Pier
Lighthouse," both of which evoke qualities of light and atmosphere in an
especially pleasing manner. Indeed, for a lesser artist such subjects might
prove dauntingly romantic. O'Gara, however, avoids the hackneyed by dint of
careful observation, making one aware that this is a plein air depiction of a
unique setting, rather than a generalized view of a subject that has been
painted by others in the past. The scene comes sparklingly alive under her
brush, leaving no doubt that one is observing an actual and irreplaceable moment
in time rendered immutable by the artist's careful attention to the individual
qualities that make it unlike any other such moment or locale.
Here,
as in other scenes, such as "Autumn in
Vermont" and "The Skellig Islands," it is this
ability to combine the immediate with the timeless that makes Ursula Boylan
O'Gara an artist to savor and admire.
This page was updated on 13/12/2007