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JAMES HYMAN GALLERY
Hughie O'Donoghue (b.1953)
Please scroll down for further information. Hughie O'Donoghue (b.1953) The Yellow Man I Oil on linen canvas 207 x 243 cms (81½ x 95¾ inches) 2008 Provenance: James Hyman Gallery, London Private Collection, Germany Literature: Hughie O'Donoghue, Parables, Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, France, 2008, (cat. 6), illustrated p.15 and again, full page (un-numbered). Hughie O'Donoghue, The Geometry of Paths, James Hyman Gallery, London, 2008, (cat. 2), illustrated detail (un-numbered). Exhibition History: Hughie O'Donoghue, Parables, Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, France, 30 May - 12 July 2008. Hughie O'Donoghue, The Geometry of Paths, James Hyman Gallery, London, 06 March - 19 April 2008. Hughie O’Donoghue, in an essay for the publication accompanying the exhibition, The Geometry of Paths (James Hyman Gallery, March - April 2008), evokes the ideas behind these major paintings: “Late one October evening as I made my way home I went into a second hand bookshop on the Charing Cross Road that I had often passed. It was seven or eight o’ clock but the shop was still open and there were a few other customers looking at the books on the shelves. The layout of the shop and its slightly eccentric nature led me to follow a meandering path which led to the basement. In the farthest corner there was a shelf of similar looking volumes bound in brown cardboard with rudimentary labels. On taking one of these down I noticed that it had last been withdrawn from the University of London library, its former home, over fifty years earlier. The volume was called The Geometry of Paths by O. Veblen and T.Y. Thomas and though the text of this dissertation was difficult to follow it seemed to be explaining in an emphatic, if somewhat abstract way how the world was. Open the door and climb into the dark. You have to find your position, check the instruments, spread the charts, check the radio, check your pulse, check anything. Waiting on the frozen airfield until your number is called. No fear boys. This is the worst time. There was a time perhaps when there was no fear but that time has long gone. The place used to be called Cotton Farm before the three runways were hastily made. From out of your small window you can see the moonlight reflecting back from the snow and frost covered fields. The scene is one of disturbing tranquillity. The planes lined up in orderly rows have a certain aesthetic , though in essence they are just big sheds with wings, the heavy transports of death, a logical development in a process of collective irresponsibility from the earliest days of manned flight. The planes are painted black and make their journeys in the night, they are called Halifax and Lancaster, somebody thought it would be a good idea to name them after somewhere grim in the north. Made in Trafford Park in Manchester, built in sections by women wearing headscarves and bolted and riveted together at the Metrovicks factory. On the side of Lancaster S is painted the figure of a saint with a halo and the motto ‘he will be back’. As time has gone on the ambiguity of this image and its message has become unsettling to you. The numbers are starting to add up, the odds are changing, the laws of chance, of avoiding mishap, of getting back safely are starting to prey on your mind. The numbers are written in red.” Hughie O’Donoghue’s three large new canvases, entitled The Yellow Man, encapsulate many of his priorities as a painter. Inspired by Van Gogh’s lost painting, The Painter on the Road to Tarascon, O’Donoghue’s pictures are mediated, as with so much of the artist’s work, by photography. The Van Gogh painting to which they refer was destroyed in the Second World War, but survives in photographs. Exactly fifty years ago one such reproduction provided the starting point for a small series of paintings by Francis Bacon and now in his latest works O’Donoghue references both these sources, suggesting a powerful lineage with the greatest reinventors of reality of nineteenth and twentieth century painting. But O’Donoghue’s new paintings are no mere act of homage or self-identification. On the contrary they embody the artist’s own particular concerns: the potency of photography as a means of referencing a lost past and especially wartime experience; the legacy of earlier painters from cave painting to the School of London; the continuing potential of the medium of painting to recreate and re-imagine the subject; the physicality of man and the materiality of the land. Hughie O’DOnoghue, writing about these Yellow Man paintings has explained that: I went to Arles in August 1973 urgently wanting to see the place, to see if there was anything left, or anything that could be learned... There is something compelling about the paintings that Van Gogh made during his stay in Arles. When I was first interested in Painting I came across one of these Arles paintings that was then on loan to the City Art Gallery, Manchester where I lived. It was a painting of an orchard in blossom and it must have been painted soon after he arrived in Arles as there is still snow on the ground. The painting is simple and urgent and done quickly so that it is possible to see clearly how it has been done. The blossoms of the tree are made with an impasto of off white stabbed onto the canvas and leaving a trail as the brush recoils. In order for art to work it has to connect in some way with other souls, how it does this is a mystery. My journey to Arles was prompted by the unrealistic hope that some of this mystery might be understood by coming to this place. Where was the house, the yellow house? In the town of Arles in 1973 nobody seems to know much about the painter Vincent Van Gogh , enquiries are met with blank looks so after a while you give up and go and watch the football team. The football team in Arles are not very good but at least you can get in for free and the people are friendly. Van Gogh is a man in a hurry or perhaps a man who knows he is running out of time. Sometimes he makes two paintings in one day, he doesn’t really understand all the theories about modern painting or perhaps he understands them too well in any case he is constantly in fear. Yet the paintings seem to stare this fear down. There is a painting where he has put himself in the picture, striding along the road in a purposeful manner and this reminds me that he was always walking the Tarascon Road and so this was probably the quickest route for him out of Arles, into the countryside. If you walk into the town of Arles from the direction of Tarascon you will pass under two railway bridges and eventually come to The Place Lamartine. In 1973 there was a supermarket here and we stopped to buy fruit, cheese and wine and asked someone on the off chance did they know the whereabouts of the Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh’s studio house. They showed me the place on the other side of the road where the house had once stood. In these latest paintings, first shown at James Hyman Gallery, O’Donoghue continues to incorporate photography but often it is completely subsumed by paint, a literal demonstration that whilst photography may be integral, it is painting that has precedence. On the one hand O’Donoghue’s recent paintings encapsulate the way that photography has changed our way of seeing forever, and on the other they reaffirm the artist’s belief in the continuing power of painting to re-imagine the past, personalise this engagement and connect with an audience. This item is sold. Please click here if you wish to buy or sell a work by this artist. | ||||||||
