gale force

Irish Arts Review

Gale ForceAuthor(s): Brian LynchSource: Irish Arts Review (2002-), Vol. 21, No. 3 (Autumn, 2004), pp. 64-67Published by: Irish Arts ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25503076 .

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RETROSPECTIVE

GALE FORCE

BRIAN LYNCH believes that the enigmas in Martin Gale's exultant retrospective,

now on show in the RHA, are more apparent than real

GAIEFORCE

'... the value of a writer and what he writes is determined by

a third dimension - depth; it is this that raises the text in a

vertical line off the page, and, most important, separates the

book from the author. '

From a letter by Boris Pasternak to Marina Tsvetayeva, 20 April, 1926

1 Martin Gale Roots

Up 1980 oil on

canvas

116.84 x 116.84cm

Separating Martin Gale from his work is a delicate operation. By some accounts he

starts out already detached, an enigmatic observer with a camera for an eye. As far

as vision is concerned, the argument is on a par with saying El Greco painted elon

gated forms because that was what he saw: his eyesight was defective. The truth is

counter-intuitive: seeing wrong can only see right. As nothing is elongated when everything

is, so too is it a mistake to think the shutter works Gale's eye. In relation to detachment, the

opposite seems to me the case: the painter and his painting are conjoined, like Siamese twins.

For all the apparent enigmas of meaning, Gale is open to intimacy, perhaps more so than any

other artist now practising in Ireland. The work is not confessional, nor is it in any way

declamatory?he is too unpompous and humorous for public breast-beating. But privacy is set

aside and the inner life is laid bare. It is jolting to realise not only how well one recognises

Gale's world?he has made it familiar?but how much of him is exposed in it

In his insightful introduction to the retrospective exhibition Aidan Dunne says that in

Gale's early paintings there is 'an overtly theatrical quality... in the sense that they often fea

ture individuals pictured at moments when they are absorbed in personal dramas, caught

up in narratives implied by the pictures' titles and details, though never elaborated'. They

are also theatrical 'in that their landscape settings are highly stylised, simplified and flat

tened out, like stage sets'. This flatness was transitory, but the dramatised moment contin

ues to be fundamental, even if, as we can now see, theatre gave way to photography and to

' the cinema?Gale's paintings are less real-life 'snaps' than organised stills from a movie.

In painterly terms the early starkness involved a problem about how to articulate the sur

face between the active forms. Centralising the image, which is how painters as diverse as

Francis Bacon and Charles Brady dealt with the dilemma, or elaborating both the image and the ground, which is abstraction, may be thought of as the two extremes he could have

gone towards. The first gives autonomy to the gesture, or to the behaviour of the mark, both

of which depend on the physicality of paint. In that sense Gale is not a centralist, though

he obviously delights in the virtuosic skills of painting, and in recent years he has displayed

an increasing confidence in the action of the hand and a greater openness to the instant of

application, evidenced by the use of watercolour. As far as elaboration is concerned, it seems

to me less a painterly than a psychological choice that Gale made?like Charlotte Bront? he

'selected the real rather than the decorative side of life', not least (though this is a formal

matter too) because the styles such an approach calls for, naturalism and realism, are capa

ble of containing multiple, simultaneous dramas.

Simultaneity is an attribute of time, and throughout Gale's work it is the passage or the

arrest of time that is the chief subject - time is necessarily halted within the image but it also

6 4 I

IRISH ARTS REVIEW AUTUMN 2004



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^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^H IRISH



T? R", Ot

-:70

A -P, d

Aw

5 Her Day Out

1996 oil on canvas

120 x 150cm

(Private Collection)

6 The Quarrel 1997

oil on canvas

120 x 120cm

(OPW Collection)

7 Leek Still Life

1992 oil on canvas

91.44x91.44

(Private Collection)

goes on while, and because, the artist and the people he is paint

ing are observing it. However much the viewer is assuaged by his

skill, their strangeness, or the beauty of the whole, this is a tragic

vision. To reinforce the point I refer to how W H Auden in his

poem 'Mus?e des Beaux Arts' divides art from what happens:

About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters: how well they understood

Its human position; how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window

or just walking along...

This illuminates Gale's work in its everyday-ness, but on the

whole it is inapplicable, for the reason that his suffering is not a

detail or a happenstance; on the contrary it goes on all over the

world of the painting; and if, as often happens, the human char

acters are looking sidelong out of the frame (reminding us that

our pofnt of view is not exclusive), then what they see, whether it

be hostile or hospitable, is made of the same material and

endures the same fate captured within the frame. In these cir

cumstances enlightenment is postponed, unless, that is, it can be

achieved in the present scene and its tension-laden moment. The

poet Dennis O'Driscoll, who writes warmly about the work in the

retrospective catalogue, describes moving house to Kildare, 'half

way between where Martin Gale grew up and where he now

lives'. He goes on: 'The place I had chosen felt like home from

the start. I had become a figure in a Martin Gale landscape and

there was nowhere else I would prefer to be'. This is true as far

as it goes, but the freedom to choose and the preference over

'nowhere else' are not givens in Gale's world. While he is more a

psychological than a social realist, the psyche is true to its soci

ety, and its edginess is literal, located politically and geographi

cally in unsettled territory, presently to be caterpillared by JCBs

for the creeping city. Gale's homeliness, if such there be, is urban,

makeshift, hard-won. Aidan Dunne says that 'it may be overstat

ing the case' to suggest that the characters 'are alienated from

their environment', but that is, I believe, because the environ

ment is itself a nervous character, estranged, stressed, intruded

upon by man and his machines. Man is the operative word?not

much help is brought to this world by woman, though her ten

derness is sensed by its absence.

Actually, when it comes to tenderness, the kind given rather

than received, it is children on the threshold of adulthood and

women at the edge of old age that move the artist most deeply. The

66 I

IRISH ARTS REVIEW AUTUMN 2004



RETROSPECTIVE ^B GALE FORCE

children, because they don't know, and the withering women,

because they do, are pitiable. Not infrequently children appear

together, as it were redoubling their bewilderment. In Indoor

Games (1989), for instance, the boy is blindfolded and his sister is

also masked, almost cartoonishly, by the door jamb?neither of

them sees what we can see, and as a consequence there is some

thing shocking, perhaps even guilty, about our silent witness (Fig

2) . Something similarly collusive may be felt, especially when the

idea of maleness is added in, about the ageing woman depicted in

Her Day Out (1999). I read the cavorting dog as having all sexual

force and she as having none, though this is counterweighted by

the strength of her independence. She is one version of the mid

dle-class ideal: perturbed, polite, imperturbable (Fig 5).

Force and fear, power and panic, energy and anxiety may be

seen as binding concepts in Gale's work. In the sense of human

agency, no one does anything violent: nothing actually happens,

which is fearful. The peace is kept, but, as we know in Ireland, it

is provisional, and the anxiety about it is palpable. Often power

is defined by its inadequacy and/or its susceptibility to decay

buildings, particularly those whose structure is revealed

(glasshouses for instance), are frequently shown to be on the

point of collapse, giving way to gravity. When it is, however, a

phenomenon of'nature', power is plain, seemingly untrammeled,

a wish-fulfilment. Seeing these manifestations of elemental anar

chic force as symbolic is unavoidable, but the symbols, unlike

those of, say, Caspar David Friedrich or Holman Hunt, are not

purpose-made, artful, designed for literary interpretation.

Although they are the product of choice, they seem undeliberated

and to have arrived all of a sudden into the artist's consciousness.

Sometimes the power is vitiated by being revealed: the tree in

Roots Up (1980) shows itself to have been, like the mind, unguess

ably complex but also tangled and shallow, its hold on the earth

tenuous (Fig 1). The blaze in Fire in the Mountains (1995) bursts

out without explanation, but while it is dangerous it is also dis

tanced from the watchers, and as a consequence its power can

only consume itself (Fig 3). Sometimes (perhaps, indeed, all the

time) the power is sexual: for instance, the torrent in The Quarrel

(1997), despite its title, seems to me an overwhelmingly positive

symbol of generation, neither male nor female, simply a source of

energy brought close to us (Fig 6). (Actually, Gale always associ

ates energy with water, mostly when it is moving but also when it

is still?then its stagnancy drains strength.)

Much of this relates to the outdoors. But Gale is also a master

painter of interiors. Natural processes continue, but without the

fluxes of water, weather, and fire, though these are sometimes seen

going on, in a reduced way, in the background. Many of the indoor

surfaces are glossy, glassy, hard and hard-edged. Unlike the land

scapes, nothing is soft or deliquescent. What is capable of organic

decay has already experienced it (dead leaves for instance) and

become, like the painted air, dry and crisp, electric for survival.

Force and

fear, power and panic, energy and

anxiety may be seen as

binding concepts in Gale's work

Power relationships persist, but their isolation serves not to

weaken but to define more sharply the contest of forces, and

often to resolve it?for instance in Leek Still Life (1992)?with a

sense of dramatic finality and exultancy (Fig 7). This is, after

all, what Gale's force is for: contained, concentrated exultation.

The interiors depend for their effects on the foreground

ing of objects, which allows them to occupy space monumen

tally and thus to withstand the passage of time: in them life

is stilled. This happens differently in the landscapes: in them

time holds sway. But the differences, like the enigmas, are

more apparent than real. In Near the Beach (1996), for

instance, the outside world is brought forward as if it were a

still-life, an almost abstract composition of simple forms and

wonderful colours, which becomes indifferent to anything

but its occasion, and glories in it (Fig 4).

Here, and indeed throughout this retrospective, it is pos

sible to do what Pasternak says is most important: separate

the artist from his work. Both have the necessary depth.

BRIAN LYNCH'S New and Renewed Poems 1967-2004 has recently been by

published by New Island Books.

Martin Gale-Painting, Nissan Art Project, RHA, 17 September-24 October 2004

AUTUMN 2004 IRISH ARTS REVIEW |

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