Adam's The Antoinette and Patrick J.Murphy Collection 23rd October 2019

116 104 BRIAN BOURKE (B.1936) Self Portrait with Blank Canvas (Knockalough, Co. Galway) Oil on canvas, 152 x 114cm (60 x 44.8“) Signed, inscribed and dated 1982 verso € 5,000 - 8,000 WILD & WONDERFUL: THE WILFUL WORLD OF BRIAN BOURKE By Brian McAvera No matter how richly endowed you are, the ability to become an artist-to-be-reckoned-with, requires more than innate talent. It requires a relentless determination, the will-power that allows one to ignore all obstacles and, crucially, it requires a double cross-fertilisation, firstly with the rich freightage of art history in the shape of what we call the Old Masters, and secondly (if the artist is lucky) with the construction of a dialogue with contemporary artists which provokes, stimulates, and allows for mutual theft. To allow the former, the artist has to travel (reproductions being no substitute for the real thing), in the course of which he or she will usually gain a rather different perspective on the home country - think of Picasso travelling from Barcelona to Paris; to create the latter, the zeitgeist has to deliver a rookery of contemporary artists, capable of rising above a provincial standard. With Brian Bourke, as with an artist like Patrick Pye, these conditions pertained. In Bourke’s case, as also with Pye, the osmosis of natural talent was already surging to the surface by their late teens. Both of them travelled, Bourke, like so many of his countrymen, lodging in London in the fifties, a richly fertile period allowing access, not only to the riches of the National Gallery, the V & A, the British Museum and the Tate, but also to a wealth of Westminster libraries, and to private galleries where one could see, not only the buoyant British art of the period, but also the American Abstract Expressionists, and the Russian Constructivists. The National Gallery gave him access to Gothic, early Siennese, Northern European and Renaissance art, while the Tate and the private galleries nudged him along the towpath towards Modernism, and, in particular, towards abstraction. Amongst many others, Van Gogh, especially as mediated through Francis Bacon, Millet, and Roderic O’Conor left their imprints. It was in the London of the late fifties and early sixties that Irish artists congregated, many of them friends of Bourke’s, like John Behan, James McKenna, Pat Hall, Michael Kane or Charles Cullen, like horses around a watering hole in the desert. Often, like Pye, Brian Bourke has been regarded as an outsider or a maverick in Irish art, even though he has always had his champions. Critics, even when praising him, frequently managed to dam him with faint praise when they were not delivering ‘some most vicious criticism. One declared I was a negative little Nietzsche’. But, like Pye, he is no longer on the periphery of Irish art, but to see this, one needs to place himwithin a European perspective, and not within a narrowly nationalist, and often provincial art history. When the cartography of Irish art is finally reconfigured, Bourke and Pye will be seen as central. Why? The answers to this multiple choice question are various: the ability to assimilate a remarkably wide range of references, conjoining for example Gothic and Renaissance influences to Modernism; the melding of Northern and Southern influences; unusual and highly recognizable colour combinations; highly distinctive draughtsmanship; and a disregard of normal perspective in favour of a spatial construction which favours an oriental viewpoint; and strikingly, the assimilation of markedly abstract areas within an overall figurative schema, reminding one of his kinship with Irish artists such as Charles Tyrrell, Felim Egan or Samuel Walsh. Thematically, Bourke, whether he is working in sculpture, oils, watercolour, drawing, mixed-media, printmaking or sculpture – he is nothing if not various technically – tends to concentrate upon a relatively limited number of genres: landscape, portraits, self-portraits and nudes. There are occasional excursions, for example into still-life or cityscape, though the latter are really a form of urban landscape. His colour sense, it is true, can raise eyebrows, particularly, as with Pye, in his ability to combine sweet and sour, the acidic and the sunny. Another way of phrasing this is that he can combine a Northern harshness with a southern indulgence. The effulgence of an Old Master can co-exist with the discoveries of the Impressionists and Post-Impres- sionists, as well as with the ruthlessly reductive world of abstract painting. It is important to stress that Bourke is, in every sense, a working artist. Modern notions of waiting for inspiration are very much beside the point. A Giotto, Raphael or Titian was a worker, a craftsman, and so is Bourke. As he remarked to John Hutchinson ‘art is the process of making something other than oneself…it’s not self-expression’. On another occasion he stressed to Paddy Woodworth that work was ‘craftsmanship…commitment to sheer excellence…and sheer bloody hard labour’. This was also very much the attitude of the English playwright John Arden who, like the artist, moved to Connemara and spent much of his working life there. Arden, who trained as an architect, stressed that the playwright, like a wheelwright, was a maker, a crafts- man, one who taught himself to hone his trade. This comparison with a playwright is not accidental, as almost all of Bourke’s work is shaped by the dramatic and the theatrical. For decades he toured with puppet shows, and a staple of his disciplined approach to the art of drawing was the depiction of actors in rehearsal: the Beckett Festival at the Gaiety, Marcel Marceau doing mime, or the actors in my own play Bankers, all of which meant actors in movement: one thinks of Degas, Forain, or Louis Legrand, all of whom did the same. Theatrical analogies are constant with him. ‘In art drama is the essential thing’ he remarked