Nowadays, artists often directly address environmental themes, whether they be locally specific such as the polluting of Lough Neagh, or globally significant as with toxic emissions into the atmosphere, or the huge concentration of plastics into our oceans, resulting in the compromising of our food chains.
Currently at the GTG, we have Claire Morgan, an artist who sees the environment as one of the central concerns of her art. This brief note however aims to place the specifics of contemporary environmental issues within the broader perspectives of, in particular, Irish art history as found in the GTG Northern Ireland Visual Art Library & Archive.
If you think about it, even in large cities like Belfast, Dublin or Cork, one is rarely more than one or two generations away from the countryside. Most of Ireland is rural and large numbers of our artists were born in rural areas, which is probably why landscape painting and allied genres such as animal painting have been so consistently popular. The vast majority of these artists did not see themselves as crusading environmentalists but, and it is a big ‘but’, as they lived on the land, their art naturally reflected what was going in any locale that they chose to paint, or to make art about.
(l-r) Landscapes by Paul Henry, Jim Manley and Nano Reid
Put simply, different artists ‘read’ the landscape in different ways. Paul Henry, for example, whose oeuvre has been admirably charted by the late S.B. Kennedy, saw the West of Ireland as a kind of rural idyll. People rarely featured, though their cottages did. The poverty of the people did not feature.
Dr. Yvonne Scott, in her catalogue ‘The West as Metaphor’, discusses over fifty artists who had produced work about these landscapes. In another catalogue, ‘Whipping the Herring’, nineteenth century Irish art is viewed as a visual record of the everyday environment; as a record of survival in adversity.
With the Northerner Jim Manley, on whom I wrote a book, the landscape is that of the hill walker, the mountaineer, the member of Greenpeace. He records the dead fish on a shoreline, or the urban driver’s rubbish, dumped on road or into a field. He is also alert to the botany of a landscape, and its habitat in relation to bird life
Brendan Rooney, a head curator at the National Gallery in Dublin, in ‘Irish Horse’, demonstrated the ubiquity of the animal over the centuries while his ‘A Time and a Place’ explored two centuries of Irish social life, in the course of which we learn a great deal about our changing environment. In the current Adam’s sale catalogue The Deborah Brown Collection, the essay notes that the artist, in the seventies and eighties, made many environmental works.
Books in the NIVARLA collection
Jeremy Henderson, in the 1980’s especially, produced large landscape paintings which had a brooding quality that reflected constant surveillance by the army.
And coming back to animals, Basil Blackshaw, who loved horses, lived in the country and mixed with farming people, in his earlier days, produced the best horse paintings since Munnings (an English specialist in the genre).
The environment is, naturally, linked to archeology, an area that has always fascinated Irish artists, whether it be Nano Reid in County Louth who was always intrigued by archeological remains, or a contemporary sculptor like Anthony Scott whose work has been heavily influenced by growing up on a farm in Yeats’ country, learning about the myths and legends associated with the area, and visiting its numerous archeological sites.
(l-r) Works by Deborah Brown, Jeremy Henderson, Anthony Scott
Art is for everyone. A library is a repository, ready for personal exploration. So use it!
Brian McAvera, October 2024
The Northern Ireland Visual Art Research Library & Archive is supported by the Ampersand Foundation, with many books and archive items donated and on loan from the McAvera & Walker Library.
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