Adam's IMPORTANT IRISH ART 2nd September 2020

www.adams.ie Important Irish Art | 2 nd September 2020 71 When the Shambles Gallery opened in Hillsborough, Sheelagh’s longstanding friendships with William Scott and F.E. McWilliam, amongst others, led to some memorable exhibitions in its unique surroundings. By then Philip Flanagan had returned to Northern Ireland from Camberwell College of Art and he brought the per- spective of a practising artist to their exhibitions, although he credits his mother’s likeability and the trust with which she was regarded by these artists for the ongoing success of the gallery. One might see in its style and ambition a defiant and determined refusal to allow the political situation to define the Flanagans’ activities. Sheelagh’s vivacity and confidence was a catalyst for many collectors who came to the Shambles and gradu- ally the crucial role she played in Terry’s life as a painter became more defined. While Philip was often called upon for an artist’s opinion of a particular work and also helped with practical studio issues, Sheelagh was increasingly able to deal on his behalf with the distractions of people, business and other issues. She knew his work and understood its context and demonstrated the aptness of her own instinct with regard to certain paintings. Their life together was divided between a number of places which all have a particular significance and Sheelagh Flanagan’s collection of her husband’s work is full of these landmarks. The landscapes he paints are not simply visual experiences, although they can have their starting point there. Underpinned by a clas- sical approach to pictorial structure, they are shaped by experience and memory; the economy of means that is a hallmark of Flanagan’s painting, the carefully considered and interrelated marks on the canvas or the minimal interventions of watercolour on paper, seem calculated to allow the place to breathe, to avoid definition and to provide space for the viewer to engage with the painting. The landscape is allowed its mys- tery and becomes a signifier of shared histories and presences that are built up over centuries along with the geological and physical accretions that formed their appearance. T.P. Flanagan’s landscapes have been considered by some as an equivalent in paint for Seamus Heaney’s words and often these paintings seem to carry the texture of ideas explored in conversations with friends during long summer evenings in Donegal or at Belfast parties. For example, the highly autobiographical Lissadell series emerged from Flanagan’s writings about his childhood there, an activity itself prompted by encouragement from Seamus Heaney. Words again take a painting beyond straightforward description in the series of Emigrant Letter watercolours, and a similar relationship of image to concept is at the heart of the complex depiction of wrapped objects. Flanagan often created compositions from multiple preparatory works, extrapolating from them to com- press visual elements into a single image. His absorption in structural analysis is a dominant element within some early paintings, such as View from St Mary’s , but this quickly became balanced with an enduring, evoc- atively poetic quality. This nuance and restraint is demonstrated in his integration of the elegantly powerful formal ideal of Castle Coole with the elusive light and structure of the Fermanagh landscape; Lough Erne is one of those places that Flanagan has defined in paint for many who know it well. The artist’s familiarity with certain places allowed him to construct a personal iconography that was both visually informative and also imaginatively correct, a representation that satisfied the need for these paintings to embody all aspects of the personal experience of a place. One might wonder whether Flanagan was drawn to painting elements constantly in flux and impossible to pin down, light, water, even air, because they forced him to go beyond visual description and to see a paint- ing as a metaphor in which the paint surface and the act of painting itself become part of that metaphor. His paintings are about many things, but at their heart is his honesty in transcribing the places he knew best and his own experience of them, as well as his personal integrity as a painter and an integrity in the life that he shared with Sheelagh. Every work of Terry Flanagan’s has a place within a lifetime of painting. We know where a motif has been seen, imagined and developed. We know the period of work in which it belongs, where it might belong within a certain group; perhaps we even have a key to a work in a poem. The exhibitions in which his paint- ings were included, the books in which they were discussed and reproduced, all this is known and available to collectors, researchers and the curious. It is easy to underestimate how much time, understanding and organisation goes into creating this detailed scholarly hinterland, as well as how much it can contribute to the growth in interest and understanding of an artist. This was Sheelagh’s achievement, alongside her elder son, the sculptor and painter Philip Flanagan, and also the curator and writer, and their close friend, Dr Brian Kennedy. Dickon Hall, February 2020