F R A NK PHE L A N
3.
F rag m en t, 1967 oil on canvas 76 x 102 cms 29 7⁄8 x 40 ins
FOREWORD What makes an artist? What forms a painter? There is the clichéd explanation and there is the reality, but is the reality different in every case? There was seemingly little in Frank’s background to point him in the direction he finally took. There was no art in the house but holy pictures and small, blue-and-white statues of the Virgin. There were no visits to art galleries or sculpture gardens to whet a young appetite. Frank had no early conviction or burning ambition to be a painter, but from a very early age, he wanted (and indeed, needed) to draw. Our father, Michael, after completing his apprenticeship, struck out on his own with a handcart and a toolbox, and through gumption and hard work, became a successful Dublin builder. In his late twenties, he won a major contract to build Montague Burton’s factory in Dublin (rare, in those days, for an Irish-Catholic to win a major English contract). Over the years, our father saw Frank’s urge to draw grow, and eventually he helped secure him a place at the Royal Institute of Architects of Ireland School. Frank’s earlier schooling had been with the James’s Street Christian Brothers School, which was hard and brutal; punishment being meted out with canes and quarter-inch, stiff leather straps. Frank rebelled and ran away daily, “mitching”, as it was called in those days. The solution was to send him to Tipperary to board at Rockwell College, which was run by the Holy Ghost Fathers. Contrary to the popular song, however, his heart did not remain there, and he has travelled a long way from there since. While there was no art in the house, there was, in the Irish way, music and singing, which we all hugely enjoyed. When a good singer or a skilled pianist came to the house, friends and relatives were invited to listen and join in. Our mother Tess, had a fine voice, and before her marriage, harboured a secret ambition to be an opera singer. As a child, her father had loved classical music and made her family spend evenings listening to radio concerts. So perhaps, the creative gene travelled through her to Frank, assisted by the drive and instinctive intelligence that drove our Father. For a time, his success ensured our family a comfortable life, and after Frank left architecture school, he was able to help him find employment as a draftsman in a structural engineering firm; a post he greatly enjoyed.
7.
A na sc au l , 2003/07 oil on canvas 41 x 51 cms 16 x 20 1⁄8 ins
Fr ank Phel an: t ran s f o r m i n g t he v i s ual w o rl d Faced with a blank canvas, Frank Phelan sums up his intention as making a painting with no subject, or at least one in which the subject is indiscernible. The small painting, Anascaul (cat. 7) might be understood as subject-free, though it is immediately recognisable as an attractive and, in some way, truthful image. It exudes a sense of light as a passing phenomenon and, if we do not entirely understand the significance of the spidery black marks, we recognise them as a necessary counterpoint to the light. Phelan is an abstract artist, which is to say his paintings are not faithful depictions ‘of’ a person or a place but are, rather, ‘about’ the impact of the world around him. Painting is a process of transformation in which he converts what he sees into equivalent colours, forms and spaces. He finds this approach more stimulating than painting a posed figure or a ‘view’ but it is difficult to sustain as it demands that he constantly draw on themes and images from an internal store or ‘memory bank’. His habitual starting point – and what might be described as his default activity – is drawing, in charcoal or ink. Phelan maintains that drawing is the constant, recognisable factor in his work, an activity that renders him free to experiment and play. He draws – and paints – on holidays in Greece and Italy and at home regularly attends a life-drawing club (Tenor Sax, cat. 24) but particularly enjoys drawing birds, among which he favours crows. His fondness for these unloved creatures is an indication of the way he works: always against the grain of easy solutions. When he started to paint, Phelan needed an identifiable subject to be able to make the first marks. Nowadays he simply draws fast and randomly on the canvas with charcoal until the marks become habitual, producing an image that demands to be taken further, in paint, often retaining the charcoal traces (Interior, cat. 9; Blue Dominant, cat. 13). In other words, drawing provides the route into the painting that is yet to be made. Phelan also recognises a subconscious thought process that contributes to the final image, which may be prompted as much by his extensive reading (Joyce, Rimbaud and the Goncourt brothers crop up in conversation) as by visual stimuli.
39.
Si g n if ier , 2014 oil and graphite on board 36 x 41 cms 141⁄8 x 16 ins
40.
In t er i o r , 2014 oil on canvas laid to board 31 x 33 cms 12 x 131⁄8 ins
41.
Sec re t L o c k D i ag o nal , 2014 oil on canvas 51 x 61 cms 19 7⁄8 x 24 ins
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