Vision Over Visions

PAT BORAN REFLECTS ON A RECENT EXHIBITION BY VAI AND AOSDÁNA MEMBER, SEAN FINGLETON.

SCARCELY HAVE WE stood side by side on the mezzanine floor of Dublin’s Copper House Gallery to study one of the drawings – a deceptively simple equilateral triangle of black mountain against blue-washed sky –than Sean Fingleton embarks on an impromptu recollection of when he made it, the weather conditions prevailing, the qualities of the particular paper, the benefits of drawing in situ rather than from photographs, and much else besides. Since I’ve known him, I’ve admired this tendency to almost total immersion in his work.

In offering a running commentary for these new drawings, more than once Fingleton speaks of “the moment of being there… even though it might have taken a few hours to do the drawing”. Even so, it strikes me that these are more than single moments, but rather extend beyond an individual instant to a greater arc of time, whether that be as brief as the progress of a wave to shore or, somewhat longer, of a cloud moving across a keenly observed landscape.

In short, there is duration in these works, a kind of narrative. It is perhaps not their major fascination, or at least their most overt, but there it undoubtedly is. It is there in what we might call the clock of the landscape changing shades and colours. And it is there in the registering of human presence that features in many of these pieces – a small settlement of some kind, for instance, providing both scale and a kind of narrative that ‘complicates’ the purely natural elements of the work. So not just landscape, then, but living landscape. Beautiful as these images are, they are less interested in the ideal than in the actual. The artist might have a ‘softer’ approach than is in evidence in the more muscular oils for which he’s best known, but he is no less engaged with the world around or in front of him. In short, he is still more interested in ‘vision’ than in ‘visions’.

The heart of the new work is a series done in oil pastel on Ingres paper, the organic quality and variations of the medium lending the drawings a subtle, almost otherworldly glow. It’s as if the images were formed on alabaster or shell, prompting the artist to respond to those innate qualities. The outlines and masses of mountains, trees, a County Cavan lakeside, or a house

and meadow on the Inishowen Peninsula are sketched in monochrome, evidently at speed, and afterwards developed into these striking but determinedly simple colour images, the initial line ‘essays’ still standing clear in the final images – a record of the effort or reach, as one might put it, being very much part of the artist’s project.

The reduced scale of these new works, certainly in comparison with the larger oils the artist was producing a decade or so ago (a couple of which are included here) is in part a response to working these days in a home studio, and the limitations that environment imposes. But it’s also a recognition that large-scale paintings require large spaces in which to shine and are not for every pocket. Fingleton appears to have made a virtue of these constraints. It is not hard, for instance, to see links to the tradition of Japanese landscape prints, with their careful framing, their subtlety, their championing of suggestion over depiction. The smaller ‘canvas’ rewards the lighter touch.

And Fingleton makes us see light anew. What else, really, is there for the landscape artist but the cast and fall of light, its movement over and through the world; the way, in one moment, it confers space and depth,

only, in the next, to reduce the same field of vision to flat planes of shade and colour.

Sean Fingleton’s is an enquiring, serious art. His first exhibition in Dublin in, well, too long has the feel of an interim project about it (including a series of somewhat tentative portraits of musicians in full flight) but perhaps all the better for that. The artist is as engaged and driven as ever, but there’s a strong sense here of new departures, of new journeys, up ahead. He continues to go out with fresh eyes and an open mind to places he has seen and depicted with great dedication over many years. There’s not much more we can ask of an artist. With this latest work, Sean Fingleton confirms that, on whatever scale, and in every sense of the expression, he’s a force of nature.

Sean Fingleton, ‘Musicians and Landscapes from Donegal to Clare’, ran at Copper House Gallery from 17 to 24 November 2022. The exhibition was curated and produced Fiona Quilligan.

Pat Boran is a writer, poet, short filmmaker, and member of Aosdána. patboran.com

Sean Fingleton, Bububa Mountain, Clonmany, oil pastel, 30x40 cm; photograph by Fiona Quilligan, courtesy of the artist.

Sean Fingleton, Summer Grass, Garten Donegal, oil pastel, 36x48 cm; photograph by Fiona Quilligan, courtesy of the artist.

Sean Fingleton, Spanish Point, Clare; photograph by Fiona Quilligan, courtesy of the artist.