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

118 in 2006, adding that ‘colours that argue with each other create tension’ or noting that ‘the placing of the actors [for actors read a plant, a tree, a rock or whatever] has to be in the right place’. This sense of the theatrical and the dramatic, which at times can bloom into overt showmanship (the artist as court-jester as Julian Campbell wittily phrased it) is intimately linked with the artist’s draughtsmanship. The Bourkian line is highly recognizable, albeit var- ious and surely inimitable. At times he draws, prepped on spinach like a Popeye on heat with lines zigzagging, bulging and radiating caricatural energy, like the comics he used to devour as a child. He doesn’t describe with his line. He uses it to create suggestion, and to inscribe movement, often with an overlapping palimpsest of lines: short stubby beams of energy, curving caresses, hard angular strokes which contain and pulse with a body’s energy. His handwriting is his line, sinuous, energy-affirmative, too speedy to have any desire to produce a classically correct construct by the likes of a Pontormo or a Correggio, but not unlike a working drawing by Tintoretto: an organic seizing of the essence of movement - for Bourke, like Tintoretto, draws like a sculptor concerned to situate a body precisely in space. Look at his drawings of Don Quixote or Sweeney, the latter oozing restless energy with a typography of scribbled gestures which energise the surroundings. It’s a baroque line which does something that only the greatest draughtsmen can do, which is to be able to energise a composition without weakening it into mannerism. It is this quality, allied to his highly individualistic use of colour, as well as his unerring compositional eye, that mark him out as a true original. When it comes to finding equivalents for this burgeoning energy one thinks of poets, whether it be the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas’s ‘the force that through the green fuse drives the flower’, or the late Victorian poet Gerald Manley Hopkins, with his notions of ‘inscape’ and ‘sprung rhythm’. Just look at Bourke’s painting of Autumn. His landscapes are far removed from the school of Poetic Landscape as typified by Patrick Collins, being characterised rather by an insistent rhyming between the formal demands of Modernism, such as colour for itself or abstracted bands of mark-making, with the constructional demands of classical composition as in the repoussoir framework that he often uses. What he paints is a subjective view of the world, as heightened as one of Derain’s landscape views of the Thames, and as abstracted as a Magritte cloud-shape. To understand the landscape, he first draws it repeatedly: I don’t see a landscape properly until I draw it. It’s a way of taking notes’. And as he further observes, in a statement well-known to any farmer or hill-hiker, ‘the landscape is never the same twice’. In the sixties Bourke was an artist who produced rather dour, wintry landscapes, often very Irish in their subdued colour, and in their sense of wintry chill. But then in the seventies his world changed. Autumn (1977) is a fine example from a whole series of views of Knock- alough, executed during this period. When you first glance at it, you are reminded of those Dutch sets of oval paintings of the Seasons, but gloriously reinterpreted: Northern coolness and Southern splendour. Then you notice his insistence on reminding the viewer that he or she is looking at a flat, two-dimensional painting: there are multiple reframings. First of all, the inner, angled section of the actual frame is painted in a darkish green. Then the painting itself is given a painted frame of a lighter green; then another one of white-over- blue, within which is another frame, this time a large, approximate oval, the top section of which, especially on the left, quite clearly does not fit perfectly with the bottom section. Not what one might anticipate… Then one might look at the corner areas, which are playful, created by the juxtaposition of the wooden frame and the oval. The top corners take their brighter tonality from the top half of the oval, and in reverse mode, the bottom ones take their darker tonality from the bottom half of the oval. It’s like a Dutch 17th century, wide-view landscape which the artist has rejigged, substituting for a low ho- rizon of blue sky and white cloud, a blue sky into which has erupted a volcano of pink and red in billowing drama. Below however is a quiet pastoral landscape with bands of green fields, spot-lit by the sun. The vigour of the top half with its drama of erupting clouds, its long scrakes of red and pink, and its organic, Magritte-like shapes of cloud truncated by the curves of the oval, contrast starkly with the cooler colour and less energetic brushstrokes of the lower half. For good measure, in the bottom corners, the horizontal stripes act as an anchor for the painting, stopping the oval from floating away into the heavens. Like many artists, Brian Bourke has always produced portraits, not commissioned ones, but rather portraits of those he wants to paint (predominantly women), and self-portraits, the sitter always being available and always being cheap, though one mustn’t forego the possibility of a perverse form of egotism: perverse in the sense that his female sitters tend to be strong, powerful women who have dignity and composure, whereas his self-portraits tend towards self-mockery, the self, seen as a weak-willed runt, rather like those downtrodden male figures slouching in Benny Hill’s television shows of the eighties. Whether the artist is in the guise of Don Quixote or Mad Sweeney, he is the anti-hero who, as Frances Ruane memorably phrased it, ‘denies his own importance’. Self-Portrait with Blank Canvas is not to be confused with another work of roughly the same title, and of somewhat different measure- ments, which is in the collection of the Irish Embassy in the Netherlands and is reproduced in Brian Bourke: Five Decades , (p.237), entitled Self with Blank Canvas. Despite the titles, neither work is simply a self-portrait, but rather an insertion of a self-portrait into a dominating landscape. This fusion of the genres makes for a remarkable work within the artist’s oeuvre. We are on a mountainside on which there is a lengthy peat ‘cut’. Much of the painting is constructed out of long curving brushstrokes, often wet over dry, in highly-keyed colours: yellows, reds, lime-greens, and pinks. The influence of Roderic O’Conor, whom he saw in London when that artist was virtually unknown, has come to the fore. With the top third we have a typically Bourkian playfulness, a positive maelstrom of livid cloud topped with oval bands of white over blue, pale blue, a darker blue, and then cerulean blue, as if we were in a version of the sky in a Renaissance painting of the Madonna. The landscape itself is divided into curving striations, as if lava is flowing down the mountainside in rivulets. Then we have, bizarrely but entirely appropriately, an acutely angled square of light – the blank canvas – against which the upper half of the art- ist’s body appears, in profile and topped with a black hat which rhymes with the black striations of the mountainside, as if carved out of the molten landscape of the mountainside itself. At the time of the Galway retrospective this was interpreted as the white canvas announcing ‘his intention to turn to a new subject’ but it seems to the present writer that this is one of those rare paintings whose meanings can change within the lifetime of the painting itself. Viewed now, the blank space looks like a portal (think of Star Trek): not a Heaneyite doorway into the dark to set the darkness echoing, but rather a two-way portal, positively pointing us simultaneously into the future and into the past: the possibilities of future paintings as well as of past ones. Whatever way one looks at it, it’s a very clever conceit. Man is in nature yet not of nature. He is an intruder but one capable of controlling and moulding this landscape to his own satisfaction. It’s Expressionism married to Pop Art and Conceptual Art; landscape torqued into portraiture. What it also is, in spades, is a European painting, ambitious, self-mocking, clever, witty, and with a controlled sensuality. For once bigger is better. From very early on in his career Brian Bourke has produced sculpture, usually Heads, and frequently Heads of women. This is not