William irvine

William irvineEbb and Flow

july 23–august 17, 2014essay by Daniel Kany

6 court street ellsworth, maine 04605 courthousegallery.com 207 667 6611

Man and His Dog, 2013, oil on board, 12 x 16 inches

cover The White Cloud, 2014, oil on board, 26 x 36 inches

Irvine’s work, to my mind, has furthered the vision of these three modernists [Hartley, Marin, and Avery]. He, too, transforms elements of the landscape into abstract entities, innovates in line and color, and grasps the essential in the world before him. Drawing on a vital sense of place and a passion for paint, over the past half century he has brought forth a body of work that has earned him a special place in Maine and American art.

— Carl little, William Irvine: A Painter’s Journey

The Beachcomber’s Table, 2014, oil on canvas, 32 x 36 inches

Blue Moon Over Tinkers, 2014, oil on board, 26 x 36 inches Cloud Passing Over Tinkers, 2014, oil on board, 26 x 36 inches

tart with an abstract painting: a trio of soft-edged horizontal bands. A lobster boat chugs across the scene—painting

another band with its foamy white wake.A woman in a yellow housecoat hangs out laundry in front

of her tiny white-scrubbed house. The windy day makes her flail about no less than the yellow blown cloth she tries to subdue.

Fisherman’s gloves, a knife and some roughly cut mackerel sit on a simple surface before the ocean. It’s a painting of a bait table. Handled with reductively minimal modernism, it a cub-ist painting. It could be a portrait of the absent fisherman, a thought poem about cutting bait or the imagination-reanimated remnants of a morning walk on the beach.

A solid stream of angled cloud shoots down towards a black sliver of an island past which a Lilliputian sailboat makes its way. Over its gray underside, the cylindrical cloud is a cascading river of white light. Vast and important, it is a vision.

While the images are scrubbed sea-glass-like to their essentials by the sand-churning ebb and flow of memory, these canvases by Brooklin, Maine artist William Irvine are thick with paint. No less sophisticated than they are bold, bright and reductive, the scenes take part in a world of dynamically balanced forms in which Nature—sublime, beautiful and uncompromising—is the spark for the celebration of human vision: painting.

William irvinesand-scrubbEd to thE EssEntials: thE Paintings oF William irvinEby Daniel Kany

The Bait Table, 2014, oil on canvas, 30 x 36 inches

Bringing in the Wash, 2013, oil on board, 16 x 20 inches

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Born in 1931 in Troon, Scotland in 1931, Irvine studied painting and began his art career in Britain. He has been a painter for his entire professional life.

Irvine met an American woman in 1958, and they married. A few years later while perusing a newspaper sent from the States, Irvine came across an ad for a hundred acres and a farmhouse in Maine. So Maine came to Irvine like a wishful dream; in turn, Irvine came to Maine and ultimately found that dream.

In London, Irvine’s abstractions reflected European painters like Howard Hodgkin (b. 1932) and the Russian-born Nicolas de Staël (1914–1955), but also American painting, particularly second-generation Abstract Expres-sionism.

In Maine, Irvine found a place that suited his artistic sensibilities, and he switched to painting the landscape. Because his work was driven by processes of memory and personal spirit, the fresh place of Maine probably had a great deal of appeal over nightmare-tortured postwar Europe. In particular, Irvine found his imagination stimu-lated by the simple houses of Down East fishermen, with each representing individual worlds. To this day, Irvine’s paintings revisit the textured memories of his first travels through Down East harbor towns like Addison, Corea and Jonesport.

From the beginning, Irvine’s Maine paintings had a reductive and fundamental sensibility. Their apparent elemental simplicity makes them accessible. They are, after all, very easy to look at. But this is precisely because

of the work Irvine does to bring into balance their two driving forces: abstraction and representation.

In The White Cloud (2014), for example, Irvine shows a sailboat moving along a black sliver of an island on a blue sea. The purple sky is dominated by a giant rectan-gular white and gray cloud that seems to reach up and across it. However simple it may seem, White Cloud is a powerful image that hits with a force so poignant it feels mystical. But its true power comes from resolving towards neither the scene represented nor the abstract structure of the painting. The boat is a sort of visual fulcrum lodged under the rectangular cloud by a sharp triangular wedge of sky. The boat is visually pulled along by an extremely subtle team of five seagulls fluttering from near the boat towards the right edge of the image. And the shape of the boat’s three sails also performs a lobster-tail-like transfor-mation moving from left to right—beginning with a rect-angle and then a pair of progressively smaller triangles that create a sort of muscular, physical form in dialogue with the other-worldly wedge of sky pointing the way.

It is an extremely sophisticated painting, but not in terms of metaphors or erudition: All of the concerns of The White Cloud develop right before your eyes. Irvine looks to Marsden Hartley, for example, not as a reference but as inspiration for a shape-driven and intimidatingly powerful view of Nature. Milton Avery similarly appears through the edges of shapes softened so that the forms dominate and the lines are all slowed to a pleasantly calm crawl.

The White Cloud, 2014, oil on board, 26 x 36 inches

Table with Crabs, 2014, oil on canvas, 36 x 40 inches

Nocturnal Nude, 2013, oil on panel, 12 x 16 inches

You will not find slashing strokes shooting through Irvine’s compositions. Instead, his smudgy edges are deliberate and thoughtful. To achieve this, Irvine almost always paints with paper towels and palette knives instead of a brush. His approach allows him to work quickly (Irvine prefers to make paintings in one go to keep his focus on the original thread of the work) and with a great deal of oil paint—which tends to get muddy when pushed around the surface with a brush. The paper towel allows Irvine—without dripping turpentine or a dirty brush—to put wet paint on wet paint, pat it for texture, smear it when he wants, soften it, build it up or remove it.

The result is that Irvine can create dense surfaces featuring a slow and luxurious materiality that fuels the elemental inten-sity of the underlying geometric forms and overall composition.

Irvine begins his paintings by responding to the shape of the canvas: “The rectangle is a resting place for shapes—whether in a painting of my table or my house. I use shapes more than any-thing else to try to bring together the final expression. Once they are on the canvas, my shapes more or less determine where they should be. They find their own resting places.”

In other words, Irvine begins with the conjoined idea of organized vision and painting. He then shifts the underlying shapes to make his paintings come together. These organizing forms are not scaffolding hidden under the main event: They are the main event.

While the original ideas well from observation, memory is the driving thought process in Irvine’s work. But after repeated reconsideration of the scene, Irvine shifts from capturing a sense of place and its most important qualities to letting the concerns

of painting drive his decisions. In other words, starting a painting and finishing it are very different things for Irvine. “At some point,” he explains, “the painting takes over. It determines what you’re going to do next. It tells you what to do and you listen to it. If I impose my thoughts and intellect on a painting, it doesn’t turn out well. It’s not only the key to getting a good painting, but it surprises you.”

The ability to be surprised by his work is a critical point of Irvine’s paintings. It means he can get outside of them and see them as a viewer. And it means that what we see isn’t Irvine’s internal world, but a shared vision—the culture of painting. It’s a way of feeling as well as seeing. It combines spirit with sensibility and vision. And it implies what the artist can bring to the public through his paintings: “In general, good paintings are spiritual. There’s an uplift in your sensitivity and your feelings. In a broad sense, they are spiritual. That’s how I judge my paintings: whether they have that feeling.”

While the original fuel for his work may be mined from memory, in the end Irvine’s standard is the here-and-now feeling of any painting. For it to ever leave his studio, a painting has to feel right to William Irvine.

art historian Daniel Kany is the award-winning art critic for the Maine Sunday Telegram and the Portland Press Herald. He is the author of numerous artist catalogs and books. He lives with his family in Cumberland, maine.

The Fisherman’s Cottage, 2014, oil on board, 26 x 32 inches

Spring Morning, 2014, oil on board, 12 x 16 inches

Heading Home IIoil on canvas

36 x 66 inches2014

Clouds Breakig Over Tinkers, 2014, oil on board, 26 x 36 inches The Long Cloud, 2014, oil on canvas, 30 x 40 inches

Passing Tinkers, 2014, oil on canvas, 30 x 36 inchesOut of the Storm, 2014, oil on board, 26 x 36 inches

Woman Planting a Treeoil on board11 x 14 inches2014

Man with Oaroil on board16 x 20 inches2013

The Scallop Sea, 2014, oil on board, 26 x 36 inches

Boats at Anchor, 2013, oil on canvas, 36 x 40 inches Three Boats at Anchor, 2013, oil on canvas, 40 x 60 inches

Table with Sea Urchins, 2014, oil on canvas, 30 x 40 inches The Lobsterman’s Table, 2014, oil on canvas, 30 x 40 inches

The Bait Table, 2014, oil on canvas, 30 x 36 inches The Abandoned Table, 2014, oil on canvas, 30 x 36 inches

Setting The Trap, 2014, oil on canvas, 36 x 54 inchesTable with Two Lobsters, 2014, oil on canvas, 30 x 36 inches

Into the Sun, 2014, oil on board, 26 x 34 inches Moonlight Harbor, 2013, oil on board, 26 x 36 inches

The Clamdigger’s Table, 2014, oil on canvas, 32 x 36 inchesMother and Child, 2014, oil on canvas, 36 x 40 inches

Heading Outoil on canvas

40 x 72 inches2014

Last Light II, 2014, oil on board, 26 x 34 inches Night Harbor, 2014, oil on board, 26 x 36 inches

Scottish Headland, 2014, oil on board, 30 x 40 inches

Leaving the Harbor, Scotlandoil on panel16 x 20 inches2013

Evening Strolloil on board16 x 20 inches2014

William irvine

BOrn troon, scotland

One PersOn eXHiBitiOnsCourthouse gallery Fine art, ellsworth, me 2012, 2014gleason gallery, Boothbay Harbor, me 2011–2013leighton gallery, Blue Hill, me 1986–2011Firehouse gallery, Damariscotta, me 2002–2009studio e, Palm Beach, Fl 2003–2006shaw gallery, northeast Harbor, me 2003, ’05, ’07mcgrath Dunham gallery, Castine, me 2001–2006george marshall store gallery, york, me 2005eastland gallery, Portland, me 2001Carnegie museum, university of maine, Orono, me 2000Davidson and Daughters, Portland, me 1996, 1999leighton gallery, Westford, ma 1982, 1995art alliance, Philadelphia, Pa 1993june Fitzpatrick gallery, Portland, me 1992Bayview gallery, Portland, me 1989noel Butcher gallery, Philadelphia, Pa 1982-–1986john little gallery, Clark university, Worcester, ma 1980rudolph gallery, Woodstock, ny and miami, Fl 1968–1976Drian gallery, london, england 1960, 1962Parton gallery, london, england 1960mclellan gallery, glasgow, scotland 1958Carnegie library, ayr, scotland 1949

seleCteD grOuP eXHiBitiOnsCourthouse gallery Fine art, ellsworth, me 2007–presentgleason gallery, Boothbay Harbor, me 2011–presentgeorge marshall store gallery, york, me 2007–present greenhut gallery, Portland, me 2006–presentelan gallery, rockport, me 2007

Center for maine Contemporary art, rockport, me 2006–2013turtle gallery, Deer isle, me 2006Penobscot marine museum at searsport, me 2002marine environmental research institute, Blue Hill, me 2001monmouth museum, lincroft, nj 1984mast Cove gallery, Kennebunkport, megregory Boon gallery, santa Fe, nmCongress square gallery, Portland, menational endowment for the arts, Washington, DCmunson gallery, new Haven, Ct 1982american art Cultural Center, Washington, DC 1978shore gallery, Boston, ma 1970–1973Portal gallery, london, englandartists international association, london, englandBlue Hill library, Blue Hill, mescottish arts Council, edinburgh, scotland 1953

PuBliC anD COrPOrate COlleCtiOnsuniversity of maine museum of art, Bangor, meCourthouse gallery Fine art, ellsworth, meHand and Flower Press, london, englandmarine environmental research institute, Blue Hill, merouse Corporation, Pittsbugh, Pascottish arts Council, edinburgh, scotland

seleCteD BiBliOgraPHyDown East Magazine, Kim ridley, april 2010Maine Home + Design, suzanne mcevoy, august 2008Maine Painters, Carl little, editor, september 2006Maine Sunday Telegram, Philip isaacson 2001Maine Times, Feature article, Donna gold 2000Bangor Daily news, Feature article 1999, 2000Art New England, Carl little 2000Portland Press Herald 1992, 1999Maine Sunday Telegram, Ken greenleaf 1996Preview 1993The Maine Times 1991The Philadelphia Inquirer 1983ArtNews, ann jarmusch 1983Maine Life 1979The London Observer 1960

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6 court street ellsworth, maine 04605 courthousegallery.com 207 667 6611

Calling in the Cats, 2013, oil on board, 16 x 20 inches