OCEAN FREQUENCY
This book was published by the oliver sears Gallery on the occasion of the exhibition Ocean Frequency Donald Teskey 7 March, 2013 – 18 april, 2013 oliver sears Gallery, Dublin, Ireland Copyright © the artist, the authors and the oliver sears Gallery oliver sears Gallery 29 Molesworth street, Dublin 2, Ireland t: + 353 (1) 644 9459 e: info@oliversearsgallery.com www.oliversearsgallery.com all rights reserved. no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise, without first seeking the written permission of the copyright owners and of the publisher. Photography Gillian Buckley Additional Photography Donald Teskey Design and production an atelier Project, www.atelier.ie Printing and lithography MM artbook Printing & Repro Binding schwind, Trier isbn 978–0–9575648–0–0
OCEAn FREQUEnCY DOnALD TEsKEY
oliver sears Gallery
OCEAn FREQUEnCY DonalD Teskey
↖ previous spread Bunatahir Bay, north Mayo, 2012
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above studio at the Ballinglen arts foundation with works in progress, 2011
Foreword oliver sears “For whatever we lose (like a you or a me) it’s always ourselves we find in the sea” e.e. Cummings
Donald Teskey has been looking at the sea for more than thirty years. not like you or I but in the manner of a dedicated student. This multi-decade apprenticeship has allowed him to make profound and complex paintings of the sea and of the land that comment on our human interaction with the natural elements, out of which we came. The cycle of paintings in ‘ocean Frequency’ is constructed in oil paint using brushes, palette knives and floats; tools that craft and shape the paint so that the texture dominates the colour. and a number of visual artifices, mysterious, abstract interventions appear unexpectedly leading the viewer away from the formalities of representation and towards the abstract. These paintings are as much about feeling the sea and land as they are about observation.
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The frequency of the wave determines its colour Theo Dorgan
← Left Cutaway bog near sheskin Forest north Mayo, 2011
There are two strands in this exhibition: the first, which admirers of his recent work may think familiar, reads as an extension or recapitulation of Teskey’s preoccupation with painting that contested place where sea meets land; the second, a sequence of smaller works, documents a serially interrupted walk inland, a thoughtful progress across semi-cultivated ground. In the first series, it is true that the artist is revisiting a terrain with which he is familiar, a topography he has painted before, and the resulting works may indeed strike many as familiar. The sea falls on the land with a great weight, and obdurate rock holds out against the incoming sea with a stubborn endurance. There is drama in this primary confrontation, a strong and sometimes exhilarating sense of contention, of irresistible force rolling in a long thunder against immovable object. There is the shock of impact, the strange and unsettling comfort of seeing that impact, that collision of forces, safely frozen before our eyes. There is also an insinuation that you, standing before the painting, are in some sense also standing where the painter stood, seeing, at some slight remove, what he saw, feeling vicariously what he felt, or something of what he felt, standing there on that fault-line in the material world. In offering the painting as a revisiting of experience, as a painting of a known (or at least knowable) place, the artist offers a version of a lived moment and also a lived-through emotional set – the viewer is invited to project herself or himself to that place where the painter stood, to stand where the white wave falls on the shore and imagine themselves there. If we think of this as a contract in capacity, it is clear that there are two elements to the contract: the capacity of the painter to offer an image sufficiently powerful as to elicit the act of imagination in the viewer, and the capacity of the viewer to respond in force of imagination to that offer. all things being equal, we might say that the work comes into life in this exchange between imaginations, in the flash of lightning across that gap, and that the dramatic mise en scene is a major driver, the source even, of that electrical discharge between two poles of consciousness.
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OCEAn FREQUEnCY DonalD Teskey
The polarities of light and dark, of sea and land, of mutating time in the moving sea, geological time in the unmoved land, these things serve to set up and underpin the essential nature of the exchange between painter and viewer, between one human existent and another: it is a pure dialectic, all the purer because it takes place inside a deeper and even stranger dialectic, that which takes place between the material world and the immaterial world of consciousness – by which I mean thought, awareness and feeling. If these sea paintings seem familiar to those who have engaged with Teskey’s work before now, there will be a natural temptation to see them as developments in, or further instances of, a known style delivering in a familiar range of technical ability and aesthetic preoccupation. I think that would be a mistake. I think that a new kind of engagement is proposed in these paintings, an engagement that takes off from what we think we know, and therefore what we think we see. It might even be that those coming to his work for the first time, or from an engagement with other phases of his work but in any case unfamiliar with his previous sea paintings, have an advantage in this engagement. There are two notable formal developments and one new departure here that, it seems to me, taken together signal a decisive shift in Teskey’s approach to painting. In the first place, there is a renewed emphasis on drawing, on the gestural power, solidity and vigour of his line. Perhaps this derives from his recent Gearagh series, a response to the sculptural line of those half-submerged remnant trees in their eerie world of half-land, halfwater – I don’t know. Whatever has caused it, the drawn matrix that interacts with colours and tones in these sea paintings seems to participate more forcefully than before in some elemental forcefield that holds both sea and land in its web, in its joltings and jaggings and suggestions of purpose felt but not explicit. In the second place, it is clear that in making these new works Teskey has committed himself more freely than ever before to the act of painting in itself. By this I mean, if you stand in close to the surfaces you can see in the layerings and shifts of focus how tone, knife-scrape and brush-stroke follow and leap from one passage to the next, you can sense the mind and hand following paint and mark, in a kind of dance across the surface, creating sub surfaces, dips, hollows and swatches so that the very skin of paint is delightedly animate with itself. There is still a fidelity to the known place, as edited and chosen for presentation in a particular work by the artist’s mind present to place and to itself, but if that bond is still kept, there is a new bond of excitement with the electric process of painting towards the realization of the
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work as an end product – as if the painting had somehow become conscious of itself as potential, was in some sense enticing the artist onward in complicity towards its self-realisation. If the forgoing two elements are to all intents and purposes unfoldings or developments from previous practice, the third element is wholly new. I mean here those airy, buoyant, fluttery but quite exact small shapes that dance over the surfaces of these new paintings. In some of the paintings (Ocean Frequency I and Ocean Frequency IV, for example) these new presences announce themselves clearly; in others, prompted by what we have already seen, we may have to search for them. These presences or shapes are purely gestural in themselves, they are not elements of the topography, nor do they require or invite a literal read as elements introduced into the territory – kites, for instance, or scraps of paper. In a strict sense they do not belong to land, sea or air but to the painting only, considered purely as an object in itself. a painting, as a material object, is a flat canvas or sheet of paper covered in paint. as such, if we strip out its layers of meaning for the moment, it is a two-dimensional object that we apprehend in a three-dimensional space. There is a measurable distance between that two-dimensional object on the wall and the material being that I am and know myself to be, as I stand there looking at it. Most commonly, that space is experienced as void and unmediated. The wholly strange effect of these slight presences and shapes dancing across the surfaces is that they appear to me to animate and somehow inhabit the void between me and the paintings, they seem to create an off-surface vortex, barely discernible but emphatically present. R. G. Collingwood, in his great work on representation, says that for the artist the experience (of the emerging work of art) “develops itself and defines itself in your mind as you paint”. The persuasive power of this vortex, similarly, develops and defines itself in the time you spend in front of a particular painting. It has two effects worth noting: the first is that it enhances and deepens our imaginative self-projection into the landscape/seascape as presented to us, it sweeps us inward and it necessarily implicates us in the editing and selection process we assume the artist undertook standing before the canvas, which in turn was standing before and also in the actual place; in other words, this powerful ‘illusory’ vortex projects us into the ‘there’ that is being painted. In the second place – precisely because these small modest shapes are no more than shapes, are without content or
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OCEAn FREQUEnCY DonalD Teskey
metaphorical freight – this vortex invites us to engage with the works as pure paintings, that is, as worked surfaces in colour and line that please us as and in themselves, stripped of all except self-grounding content. (The paradox here, of course, is that the vortex itself has neither content nor extension, is literally nowhere). Perhaps it is best, and simplest, to say this: these shapes, somehow triggering this offsurface vortex, allow us to alternate with enormous rapidity between the painting as topographic reproduction, with all the freight of that, and the painting as a pure object-initself. It may even be, given sufficient time, that the habitual viewer of one of these works might succeed in experiencing both complexes of sensation at once, in a kind of sensoryaesthetic fusion. The pleasures afforded by the series of smaller works are less dramatically obvious, but here again there is the sense that Teskey is pushing into a new kind of engagement, with the work and with the expected viewer. speedy in their execution, more evidently concerned with recording sensation, these paintings record a trajectory across a landscape stripped to its elements – bare trees, bare swathes of moorland – but also, mysteriously, more hospitable to human kind. It may be a question of scale: where the sea paintings are physically quite large, their very size reinforcing their elemental, almost overwhelming power, these smaller works, even where they refer to or depict large areas of territory, are far less confrontational. Because, deliberately I think, they have something about them of snapshots registering on a moving consciousness, they draw less attention to the making process itself, to the artist as maker; they allow us the fond illusion that the thing or place depicted takes a slight precedence over the individual painting as object in itself, and this allows us to register their existence as a gift from the artist – ‘I saw this and thought you’d like to see it, too, so I painted it for you”. In that kind of relationship with a work, we are more likely to feel a nebulous kind of camaraderie with the artist than to feel challenged by his or her vision, more likely to feel recruited into a shared vision than required to process and assimilate a stern exercise in directed consciousness. Well, that may be a kind of false comfort we offer ourselves on account of the scale of these paintings. It may also be that we respond more easily to these works because where those others deal with brute mindless forces and presences, the monumental fluidity of the sea, the brute geological obduracy of the land, in this suite of smaller paintings we are enfolded in vegetal time, kept safely back from the troubled margins, able to find our way home no matter in what direction we strike out.
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nevertheless, but in perhaps a more unobtrusive way, these paintings, too, carry themselves and us beyond a reductive idea of representation; here, too, we see the selfdelighting hand and mind at work, albeit on a more modest scale. Perhaps the plainest indication that these paintings are meant to be enjoyed as paintings is this: the point of resolution in each individual painting is rarely or ever what classical painting proposes as the remous – the point of stillness out of which movement eddies and swirls – that is to say the vanishing point where the discernible lineaments of the composition converge. In these paintings the point of rest can be a balancing of elements in the brushwork, in the juxtaposition of tones, in the balance worked between an element in the landscape and the means employed to evoke that element. In other words, each of these paintings is resolved in terms of the act of working paint, rather than in terms of what is depicted. That, for me, gives these works a sense of living excitement that while congruent with the same sense of excitement in the ‘seascapes’ comes nevertheless from a different place in the art and act of painting. Dublin, 2013
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Ocean Frequency Diptych, 2012 oil on canvas, 183 × 325 cm
OCEAn FREQUEnCY DonalD Teskey
Coast II, 2011 oil on canvas, 60 × 60 cm
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OCEAn FREQUEnCY DonalD Teskey
Coast I, 2012 oil on canvas, 60 × 60 cm
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OCEAn FREQUEnCY DonalD Teskey
Ocean Frequency I, 2013 oil on canvas, 163 × 182 cm
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OCEAn FREQUEnCY DonalD Teskey
Ocean Frequency II, 2013 oil on canvas, 132 × 152 cm
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OCEAn FREQUEnCY DonalD Teskey
Spume, 2013 oil on canvas, 40 × 50 cm
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OCEAn FREQUEnCY DonalD Teskey
Ocean Still, 2013 oil on canvas, 100 × 120 cm
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OCEAn FREQUEnCY DonalD Teskey
Ocean Frequency IV, 2013 acrylic on paper, 76 × 100 cm
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OCEAn FREQUEnCY DonalD Teskey
Horizon Still, 2011 acrylic on paper, 38 × 42 cm
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Horizon Still II, 2011 acrylic on paper, 38 Ă— 42 cm
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OCEAn FREQUEnCY DonalD Teskey
Ocean Frequency III, 2013 oil on canvas, 110 × 130 cm
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OCEAn FREQUEnCY DonalD Teskey
↖ previous spread sheskin Forest, north Mayo, 2011
Sheskin I, 2011 from the Sheskin Forest series acrylic on paper, 38 × 42 cm
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Sheskin II, 2011 from the Sheskin Forest series acrylic on paper, 38 Ă— 42 cm
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OCEAn FREQUEnCY DonalD Teskey
Loop Walk I, 2011 from the Sheskin Forest series acrylic on paper, 38 × 42 cm
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Loop Walk II, 2011 from the Sheskin Forest series acrylic on paper, 38 Ă— 42 cm
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OCEAn FREQUEnCY DonalD Teskey
Loop Walk III, 2011 from the Sheskin Forest series acrylic on paper, 38 × 42 cm
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Sralagagh I, 2011 from the Sheskin Forest series acrylic on paper, 38 Ă— 42 cm
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OCEAn FREQUEnCY DonalD Teskey
Rise II, 2011 from the Sheskin Forest series acrylic on paper, 38 × 42 cm
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Sralagagh III, 2011 from the Sheskin Forest series acrylic on paper, 38 Ă— 42 cm
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OCEAn FREQUEnCY DonalD Teskey
at work on Downpatrick Head, north Mayo, 2011
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biographical notes
Artist’s Acknowledgements
Donald Teskey RHA was born in 1956. He studied at limerick school of art and Design graduating with a Diploma in Fine art in 1978. He came to prominence as an artist through his skill as a draughtsman during the 1980s, with several significant solo exhibitions as well as being the recipient of awards in eVa and the Claremorris open exhibition. since 1993 he has crafted out a substantial body of work as a painter of the urban and rural landscape and more recently the ruggedness of the western seaboard. sometimes working on a very large scale His work has been exhibited in the Uk, Usa, China, south africa, Canada and throughout europe. In 2003 he was elected a member of the Royal Hibernian academy. He lives and works in Dublin. He is a member of aosdána.
These paintings began life during a six week residency at the Ballinglen arts Foundation in Co. Mayo in May 2011. The works on paper were completed during that period, while a number of the larger paintings were developed in my Dublin studio in the months that followed. My thanks to the Ballinglen arts Foundation for providing that most valuable of assets for an artist-inresidence – an environment and an atmosphere that is totally conducive to work. My thanks to Theo Dorgan for composing an insightful and delightfully probing response to the work and to oliver sears and Jane norton at the oliver sears Gallery.
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OCEAn FREQUEnCY DonalD Teskey
selected solo Exhibitions
selected Group Exhibitions
2013 2012
Ocean Frequency, oliver sears Gallery, Dublin Nature Reserve-Paintings from The Gearagh, Town Hall Gallery, Macroom, Co. Cork
2012
2011
Nature Reserve, art First london. A Connemara Folio, Clifden arts Festival, Co. Galway
Hibernation, Winter Group exhibition, oliver sears Gallery, Dublin Radharc american Irish Historical society, new york City
2010
Graphic Studio 50 years in Dublin, Irish Museum of Modern art (IMMa), Dublin Éigse Carlow Retrospective, VIsUal Carlow
2008
Revelation, national Gallery of Ireland Celebrating Drawing, national Gallery of Ireland New Additions, national self Portrait Collection, limerick University
2007
Into Landscape, Touring exhibition of drawings by artists – various locations Ireland Siar 50, Irish Contemporary art society collections at IMMa
2005
Rhyme and Resin, a collaboration between poets and artists. organised by Poetry Ireland RHA Members Drawing Exhibition, ashford Gallery, Dublin H2o, Model arts Centre and niland Gallery Time of Shaking, art for amnesty, IMMa, Dublin An Irish Eye; Landscapes of Fact and Imagination, Cape Town south africa
2010
The Idea of Islands, RHa Gallery, Dublin
2009
Loops & Sidings, Rubicon Gallery, Dublin
2007
New Paintings, Mullan Gallery Belfast From Bethany to Beacon Falls, Rubicon Gallery, Dublin
2006 2005
Coastline Narratives, art First london Land Fall Variations, drawings, Rubicon Gallery, Dublin Paintings, Vangard Gallery, Cork Tidal Narratives, limerick City Gallery of art
2004
Not Only Forms, Rubicon Gallery, Dublin
2003
Paintings from the Red Mill, art First, london
2002
New Paintings, art First, london
2001
Island Crossings, Rubicon Gallery, Dublin
2000
art First, london
1999
Paintings 1993–1999, Rubicon Gallery, Dublin
1998
Vangard Gallery, Co. Cork
1997
Rubicon Gallery, Dublin
1996
Clink Wharf Gallery, london
1995
Rubicon Gallery, Dublin
1993
Rubicon Gallery, Dublin
2004
2003
Éire/land, McMullen Museum of art, Boston College, Usa Reflecting on Success – Past Winners, Claremorris open exhibition
1998
Art First, Three-Person show, london (Gwen o’Dowd & Janet Pierce)
1997
Landscape & Recollection, The Ballinglen experience, RHa Gallagher Gallery, Dublin Clink Wharf Gallery, london art Club Burgwedel e.V. Hannover, Germany (work from Ireland & scotland) Éigse Festival, Carlow (Invited artist)
selected Residencies 2012
artist in residence at Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris
2011
Ballinglen arts Foundation, Co. Mayo
2008
The Gearagh artists Residency Programme, Co. Cork
1996–2013 Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA), Annual Exhibition, Dublin
Ballinglen arts Foundation, Co. Mayo
1996
2006
Josef and annie albers Foundation, CT. Usa
2002
Ballinglen arts Foundation, Co. Mayo
2003
The Vermont studio Centre, VT. Usa, awarded Fellowship
1996 1995
Ballinglen arts Foundation, Co. Mayo Tyrone Guthrie Centre, annamakerrig, Residency
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National Collection of Contemporary Drawing, limerick City Gallery of art Living Landscape, West Cork arts Centre, skibbereen Connaught Brown Gallery, london
1984–88 Divisions, Crossroads, Turns of Mind, Some New Irish Art, touring exhibition of north america, Canada and Finland – curated by lucy lippard
selected Group Exhibitions cont. 1983
2003
EV+A Prizewinners Exhibition, Dublin, Belfast and limerick
1981–82 GPA Awards Exhibition, Dublin 2002
Donald Teskey New Paintings, catalogue essay by aidan Dunne, art critic with the Irish Times published by art First, london IsBn 1 901993 27 2 to coincide with an exhibition at art First, london
2001
Donald Teskey Island Crossings, catalogue essay by John Horne, Professor of Modern european History Trinity College, University of Dublin published by The Rubicon Press ltd, Dublin IsBn 0 9532744 9 7 to coincide with an exhibition at the Rubicon Gallery, Dublin
1999
Donald Teskey Paintings 1993–1999, catalogue essay by andrew lambirth published by The Rubicon Press ltd in association with art First london IsBn 0 95327044 6 5 to coincide with an exhibition at art First, london
selected bibliography 2011
A Connemara Folio, by Donald Teskey published by occasional Press IsBn 978 0 9564786 1 0
2010
The Idea of Islands, by Donald Teskey and sue Hubbard published by occasional Press IsBn 978 0 9548976 9 7
2009
Irish Arts Review, Vol 26 /no. 4, “Tracking Donald Teskey”, Interview by Brian Mcavera
2008
Conversation in the Mountains, limited edition, Text by John Banville, Images by Donald Teskey published by Gallery Press IsBn 978 185235 443 5
2007
From Bethany to Beacon Falls, with essay by Gordon Teskey and nicholas Fox Weber published by Rubicon Gallery IsBn 978 0 9554084 3 4
2005
Profile 22–Donald Teskey–Tidal Narratives, published by Gandon editions IsBn 0948037 245 to coincide with an exhibition at limerick City Gallery of art. Irish Arts Review, Vol 22 /no.3, “ocean narrative” by samuel Walsh
2004
Donald Teskey Not Only Forms, Catalogue essay by Gerard smyth, poet and managing editor of the Irish Times additional text by Peter Maxwell of the Ballinglen arts Foundation published by the Rubicon Press ltd, Dublin IsBn 0 9541322 6 2 to coincide with an exhibition at the Rubicon Gallery, Dublin
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Donald Teskey Paintings from the Red Mill, catalogue introduction by Rikki Ducornet, author published by art First, london IsBn 1 901993 38 8 to coincide with an exhibition at art First, london
Collections The arts Council of Ireland; Irish Museum of Modern art, limerick City art Gallery, The Contemporary Irish arts society; The office of Public Works; national self Portrait Collection, Royal Hibernian academy; allied Irish Banks; Baring asset Management, london; kPMG, Dublin; Ulster Bank, Dublin; national Drawing Collection, limerick; Butler Gallery Collection, kilkenny; First national Building society; augustus Cullen & sons solicitors; Irish life assurance; Ballinglen arts Foundation; Boyle Civic Collection; limerick City University; kelly’s Hotel, Wexford; st lukes Hospital; st Patricks Hospital; Royal Victoria Hospitals, Belfast. Private Collections in Ireland Uk europe & Uk
overleaf → Downpatrick Head, north Mayo, 2011