IRISH ARTS REVIEW

BARRIE COOKE ON PAINT AND PAINTERS

I would like to elicit from you a com plementary statement to Aidan Dunne's critical investigation of your work over the past thirty years, for the catalogue which I am editing for your exhibition. In research ing your work, it became obvious that you

make copious amounts of drawings. Are these just preparatory for the paintings or drawings in their own right?

I don't draw just for the sake of drawing. For the past twenty years I've used a small sketch book, I fill about two or three a year, the stack is about four feet high now. I never envisage these being exhibited. If I think of an idea I'll make a sketch of it, or else if something in the landscape catches my eye I'll sketch it. There are times when I don't have my pencil and paper with me and I'll find something that interests

me, in that case, I'll draw on the palm of my hand with my fingernail. The process of drawing focuses your eyes in a way that simply looking just can't do. It helps you be the thing you are looking at.

Your landscape paintings are executed from recollection, there are only two subjects you draw from life, your portraits and nudes.

I hardly ever make preparatory drawings

Barrie Cooke studied in the United States with Rattner and Levine before settling in Ireland where he has lived and worked

since 1954. Here he talks to Patrick Murphy, Curator of the

Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College, Dublin, where a major

exhibition of Cooke's work 1966-1986, will be shown

for a month from April 10th to May 10th.

for anything. In portraiture I never think of the character of the person otherwise it becomes illustration. You have to try to experience how that face is as a landscape, a physical feature, a

place. In painting the nudes I pursue two conflicting aims, I like it to be a particular body, yet, I want it to be any body - just light on skin.

You work your paintings over a couple of months don't you, or in some cases, years?

I'd love to be able to do it instantly, and occasionally that has happened, very, very occasionally. Watercolours can be

more instantaneous, they are there to capture one aspect of the thing, hence

they are incomplete. That's why you move to oil paint. With oils you can go on and on painting and scraping it off again, adding allusions to it, making it more pictorially resolved. The more allusions art holds, and this is true for painting and poetry, the bigger it is. Chardin is a wonderful painter but Rembrandt is a bigger painter.

You have returned to a couple of specific themes in your work over the last twenty years. How does your treatment differ from the early sixties to the present?

The first painting tended to be spontan eous and I now find them sketchy. I used thin paint on them and I still use thin paint but I'm trying to get more body into it. This isn't necessarily thick paint but a greater density in the space of the painting. That process has been going on slowly for quite a long time and the first fear was that I would lose the freedom of the thing. Lately, in the last few years, I gained more freedom in some respects even though the paintings are worked on much longer and there are passages of relatively dense paint but always played against thin glazes. It's a very classical approach, it's the way Rubens painted. It gives a solidity.

Megacerous Hibernicus, 1983. Hazel Clump, 1985. Oil on canvas. 168 x 183. The Gordon Lambert Collection. Oil on canvas 122 x 122. The Hendriks Gallery.

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IRISH ARTS REVIEW

BARRIE COOKE ON PAINT AND PAINTERS

Indeed you are known for your thin glazes, the green, black and brown paintings of forests and lakes. But in contrast the work of the early seventies springs to mind, those dry, almost abstract painting of couples and bones.

Let me say I've never thought of myself as an abstract painter. The work of the early seventies was useful to me then because I knew that this sensuous style was something I was getting too good at, too fluent. So I decided to get rid of all the nice things about it. Any sen suality that survives is in spite of myself. I think these hard paintings gave me something, possibly contributed to a sense of structure. I don't mean struc ture in a geometrical sense, I mean a spatial weight, like in Soutine.

Do you sometimes find paint, an in adequate medium to achieve that spatial weight, that physicality?

In the early seventies I was fascinated by bones and joints. I did hundreds of watercolours which were interesting, and I also made a few paintings but they were not weighty enough. They were not physically real. So then I started making the boxes. They had two aims. One, to 'have' the physical object, and, two, to find out about the mood or experience of the thing.

Rather like what you were saying about the nudes.

Yes, I consider these aims as conflicting. You see part of me has always wished to

be hard-edged, tight, structured, precise. That is why I've always loved Bellini, Piero and Beckmann - Beckmann since I was nineteen years old. The trouble is that the hard and precise is by its nature contrary to the free and instinctive. The latter, unfortunately, seems to be the only way I can make discoveries through paint. My greatest effort and difficulty, though it sounds like a contradiction in terms, is to paint intuitively, to keep spontaneity alive over many weeks, even months. But I always wish for the enclosed, complete object, like a poem by Donne. I'm not interested in 'sketches' any more or 'instant feeling'. I sometimes think that inch by inch, year by year, I'm beginning to learn how to combine the two.

This oscillation between parallel direct ions has been both a feature of your

method of work and your subject matter. So we have dry/wet painting, the lime stone Burren/the fecund forest, lake painting/subterranean knots. Does this manifest itself when you start a new canvas?

Not really. If I want to make a painting about a certain sort of green, that may be the start of a painting, but the painting may also be about a tree. One half of me would like to make that tree as tree-like as I can but that would be at the expense of an emotional response to the tree. A good example of this

would be to compare the work of Phillip Pearlstein and Lucien Freud. Pearlstein's work is cold, Freud's is as real but is imbued with an almost physical emotion, if such a thing exists.

So colour is the catalyst for you beginning a painting.

Colour can be the closest equivalent you can find to an emotion. It's not a conscious thing, that this colour sym bolizes that emotion. I often start a painting with nothing but the tremen dous sense of a quality of a colour, sometimes the only way you can pursue that is by putting another colour beside it. At the moment there is more blue and orange than ever before, they are two complementaries which excite me,

marvellous to work with because they are so simple.

Is your palette changing?

Yes. In the paintings of the last twelve months and especially in the nudes.

In the painting behind us 'Elk meets Sweeney' both sides of the diptych seem to represent the older and the more recent of your work. We have the elk excavated from the bog brown pigment and the other panel, light filled, with a crouching Sweeney. Then there's that curious colour ed form in the top of the left panel.

I've been working on that painting since

early last year. The right hand panel was

painted quite separately as an Elk. It was later I decided to add the left hand panel and make a diptych. I was interested in what would happen if the

Elk met Sweeney. The shape in the top left is to do with light, and light as opposite to bog.

To stay with light for a moment. We have discussed earlier your disposition towards oscillation between different approaches, are you now moving away from your sub terranean Knot paintings to the sky and air?

It is something in the future I'd like to look more at, clouds for instance.

Turner is one of my heroes and with him it is almost all sky. Yet the sky is just as dense as the earth. And if I could find some way to be as empathetic with the sky as I am with the earth, I would love to do it, It's begun, I've started to look.

The entrance of Sweeney into your paintings has heralded another innovation. For the first time in your work a narrative element is appearing within the image.

I've made a lot of small paintings about Sweeney over the last ten years. Very few have gone out of my studio because I still feel that they are useful guides towards something I want to go into

more deeply. Sweeney is one of these rare figures, "mythic" - to use an ill used word, who carries a lot of space and emotional room within him, for people like us. "He's a useful fellow," as Seamus Heaney said.

Useful for you in what way?

I realized that Sweeney who himself identified with the natural world, could give me a sort of alter ego, that could still be me but could actually appear in the paintings. I never before managed to put a person/myself in a landscape because in order to understand it, I had to be it. Sweeney let me step aside and enter.

"Barrie Cooke" by Aidan Dunne is to be published by the Douglas Hyde Gallery and the

Arts Council of Northem Ireland in April 1986 (136 pp. 24 colour plates, 60 black and

white reproductions).

COLOUR ILLUSTRATIONS OVERLEAF

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