Adam's Mid-Century Modern 19th November 2019

34 44 PATRICK GRAHAM (B.1943) MAYO SERIES, APPROACHING STORM Oil on canvas, 183 x 204cm Signed, inscribed and dated 2007. Provenance: With Hillsboro Fine Art, label verso. From the Antoinette & Patrick J. Murphy Collection. Born Mullingar, County Westmeath in 1943, Patrick Graham’s childhood shaped his life and art. His father emigrated in search of work, his mother spent long periods in hospital suffering from TB, and, aged six, Graham was sent to ‘a small rural community, to my grandparents, my brother and sisters went other places, orphanages I think’. Displaced, without siblings, ‘I became a watcher . . . at six or seven years . . . I became aware that I was a stranger, I was silent; for my secret self I found secret places - a pool of spring water, a tree so tall and full of flickering light that lifted me high up into the unpeopled sky. . . . In my private world there existed an innocence of God and of beauty, a magical belief in nature, my holy trinity, so to speak, was God, nature and a secret self receptive to a vision not of the eye but of the sensual engorge- ment that saw from within.’ He tells of how ‘I would strip naked on the bog, fill myself with the sensuality of the black earth, then black light and the head-high colour’. This for Graham was ‘pure energy’ and ‘my truest most innocent experi- ence of the transcendent body made one in God and nature’. But ‘bog, body, the eating and drinking of colour, the sensual earth and the sensual body and spirit’ of boy- hood gave way to power and terror on entering the Christian Brothers. There he experienced ‘religious fear and religious guilt’ but school also offered hope. In 1957 he began to help his art teacher provide stage sets and backdrops for local amateur productions and it was this that formed Patrick Graham’s palette which Peter Murray lists as ‘ochres, umbers, Titian reds, purples, Naples yellow and blue-blacks’. A brilliant draughtsman and teenage prodigy, Patrick Graham won a scholarship to NCAD and was rec- ognised as such by his tutors and fellow-students. But he himself felt that he ‘collapsed under the dogmatic demands of academic tyranny’. After college, he worked in advertising for a while, abandoned painting for years and in an Interview with John Daly of Hillsboro Fine Art said, ‘I left behind that part of my life that stretched from 1962 to 1983 and began again from nil’. In a 1978 solo exhibition Graham presented his NCAD Diploma from 1964 with Cancelled stamped across it accompanied by a self-portrait with gouged- out eyes. Today, Patrick Graham, is revered by Irish artists, is internationally acclaimed and has been the subject of numerous exhibitions [Los Angeles, Amsterdam, London] and symposia here and abroad. Elected to Aos- dána in 1986, Graham was awarded the President’s Gold Medal, Oireachtas Exhibition 1987 For years, Graham had a house and studio in Lacken, on the North Mayo coastline. Very interested in that landscape’s archaeological and historical past, especially sheela-na-gigs and famine graves, speaking of the broader landscape he told John Daly that he loved ‘to look into nothingness’ there. This magnificent painting, in which Patrick Graham’s intense, sensual, boyhood connection with landscape still holds, gives us a bird’s eye view of a rugged, dramatic coastline. In the foreground a solid cliff face is loosely, fluently rendered. Low down, a cave’s dark opening contrasts with a sunlit grassy stretch on the cliff top and the gleam of silver sandy beaches in the distance, along the coast, lures and delights the eye. We are on the edge of the North Atlantic and it’s captured here translucently. Signed lower right ‘Graham, Lacken 2007’ the words ‘Mayo 2007’ are also found top centre. The words, lower left, ‘Approaching storm North Mayo Coast’ indicates imminent change, nature in constant flux. Patrick Graham likes to show the work and disappear. ‘If it needs me around to give it life, then I’ve failed.’ To John Hutchinson [in an Irish Arts Review interview] he spoke of ‘absolute surrender in relation to my work’. That ‘a loss of self-will, combined with an awesome sense of - for want of better words - some sort of “God experience”, is what I’m trying to achieve.’ And that’s what he achieves and achieves gloriously here. Niall MacMonagle, October, 2019 € 10,000 - 15,000