A new essay by James Hyman exploring Hughie O'Donoghue's use of painting and photgraphy.
THE REAL AND THE IMAGINED IN THE PAINTINGS OF HUGHIE O’DONOGHUE
James Hyman, St Patrick’s Day, 2008
Hughie O’Donoghue has recently been working on a series of manifesto paintings that encapsulate many of his priorities as a painter. At their heart is the human form – often presented life-size or even a little larger – and central to them is an ongoing engagement with photography. As such these paintings encapsulate key aspects of O’Donoghue’s work: 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; the fidelity or otherwise of photography, the staging of actual and imagined events.
i) Fields of memory: Hughie O’Donoghue and contemporary history painting
“The voice of passion is better than the voice of reason.
The passionless cannot change history.” Czeslaw Milosz, Child of Europe, 1946
For Hughie O’Donoghue, as for all painters at work today, to engage with the figure and to address the world in which we live means to work under huge shadows. One shadow is a century and half of photography and its appropriation by a range of artists from Francis Bacon to Andy Warhol. Another is a world of wars and horrors. Brought together, the claims made for the immediacy, directness and fidelity of photography collide with a heightened sense of mortality and vulnerability. It is appropriate, then, that at the core of O’Donoghue’s work is the human body and that so often it is seen as fragile. Yet in today’s world of Photoshop and digital manipulation the veracity of such images - from TV news to the pages of fashion magazines - is constantly under threat. O’Donoghue’s challenge is to cut through such cynicism, to acknowledge that picture-making, like memory, is a construct – but to assert that nevertheless it retains the potential to strip away the veils, to address big themes and to speak to us all.
The paintings of Hughie O’Donoghue, with their incorporation of photography, are in this sense post Baconian and post Warholian. By foregrounding the photographic, O’Donoghue’s paintings interrogate their own origins in memory, myth and document. Constructs, these works can nevertheless jolt and startle with their immediacy. How, then, is one to account for their particular impact, the way that they unfold over time? Paradoxically it is this very incorporation of photography that provides the key. For Bacon, as for Warhol, the appeal of photography was its directness hence the attraction of press photographs designed to convey the dramatic and sensational, a concern that would increasingly lead Warhol to appropriate the language of advertising as subject and method. In O’Donoghue’s case, however, the sources are often personal not public, quiet not declamatory, intimate not overt. The result is paintings that, in contrast to Bacon and especially Warhol, give up their secrets grudgingly.
O’Donoghue’s paintings – whether or not they incorporate a photographic element – are slow burners. This has always owed much to the handling of paint and the way that a commitment is expected on the part of the viewer. Warhol was not afraid to address major social themes but his swirls of paint across a car crash, electric chair or race riot, animate the surface but do not penetrate it. They do not engage with the image but suggest a dislocation between painting and photography that challenges the very viability of paint marks: this is an art of detachment and self-effacement. O’Donoghue in contrast is a believer, a man of passion and compassion. This bringing together of imagery is as potent as a Haiku by Basho, in which contrasting images are paired, one suggestive of time and place, and the other of something more fleeting:
A weathered skeleton
in windy fields of memory,
piercing like a knife
In bringing together his disparate sources – painting, photography, objects - O’Donoghue allows each ingredient its own identity, yet the effect is of unity not dissonance. To wrestle with the photographic source is to make it his own, to integrate form and content.
To engage with photography in this way is rare. Gerhard Richter and Luc Tuymans may have turned to photography as a source for their contemporary history paintings but their engagement with the image is altogether cooler: as a starting point for painting of studied passivity. In contrast there is an intense object quality to O’Donoghue’s combination of materials that echo the surfaces and symbolism of Antoni Tapies, whose recourse to the imagery and symbolism of Christianity he also shares.
O’Donoghue’s incorporation, rather than mimicking, of photography also suggests other more immediate allies. It is to Anselm Kiefer, working in Germany and France, and Zhang Huan in China, that one must turn for artists with a similar ambition. In each case the artist has included photographs in paintings that engage with the heavy weight of his nation’s past. For them, as for O’Donoghue, the land itself has a particular national resonance. Kiefer’s engagement with the blood and soil of Germany and Zhang Huan’s use of ash to depict scenes from Chinese history are matched by the materiality of O’Donoghue’s presentation of the land and sea of Ireland. The singularity of O’Donoghue’s achievement lies in the use he has made of his own family’s history, especially his father’s wartime experiences as a soldier in Europe.
O’Donoghue, Kiefer and Huan also share an overt physicality in their handling of material and the corporeality of their imagery. Each uses his own body in his work – Huan in performances, Kiefer in posed full length figures and O’Donoghue through photographs of parts of his body - but where they differ is in touch. In part this may be due to their use of different materials: plants, lead and ash are not as inherently expressive as oil paint. In part because O’Donoghue’s paintings, in contrast to those of Kiefer and Huan’s, are emphatically about the actions of the artist’s hand. In a practical sense this may be due to the fact that Kiefer and Huan both have factories and assistances but it is more fundamentally a matter of attitude and choice.
O’Donoghue’s paintings, with their insistence on every mark and brushstroke, are not just about excavating the past but also about the artist’s own engagement with it. These are insistently first-person narratives, in which the life stories of others – especially his own family – are not just recreated but re-imagined. In this emphatic subjectivity lies their strength and in this respect the artist’s own particular history is a key. It is surely no coincidence that O’Donoghue’s practise as an artist comes out of two of the dominant tendencies in painting of his own lifetime, and that both of these tendencies emphasise the touch of the artist as the sign of authenticity: abstract expressionist painting typified by Willem de Kooning, in which abstraction is deformed towards the figure, and School of London painting typified by Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon and Leon Kossoff, in which the figure is displaced towards abstraction.
On the one hand O’Donoghue’s recent paintings reaffirm the artist’s belief in the continuing power of painting and its ability to connect with an audience. On the other, by increasingly making explicit the artifice of their construction, these pictures acknowledge the way that photography has changed our way of seeing forever.
ii) Tableaux Vivants: photography and theatre in the paintings of Hughie O’Donoghue
“The first man who saw the first photograph …
must have thought it was painting: same framing, same perspective….
Yet it is not by Painting that Photography touches art, but by Theater….
however “life-like” we strive to make it….
Photography is a kind of primitive theater, a kind of Tableau Vivant,
a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the dead.”
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, Reflections on Photography,
(La Chambre Claire) 1980, (trans Richard Howard) pp.31-32
Despite the declaration that ‘the camera never lies’, the truthfulness of photography has been questioned from its very origins. In the Grand Palais’s recent Gustave Courbet exhibition the inclusion of works by one of the earliest photographers, Humbert de Molard, merely confirmed the artifice of photography, and in doing so raised questions Courbet’s fidelity to his subject.
No mere capturing of appearance, de Molard’s photographs are derived from paper negatives that are a multi-media concoction of chemical processes hand-worked with graphite, ink, watercolour and varnish. Each picture is a melange of invention and addition in which shadows come in and out of focus and details are redrawn. Such contrivance is matched by the artifice of what is shown. The greatest genre scenes in early photography, de Molard’s tableaux of the 1840s and 1850s possess a strong performative element in which a familiar cast of characters take up different roles and poses: Louis Dodier as hunter, bean-sorter, pig-slaughterer and, most famously, prisoner. There is immediacy to these scenes, but also a profound knowingness that is informed by a deep awareness of the art of the past. They have a materiality that rivals Courbet, yet possess an imaging that comes straight from a seventeenth century genre scene.
Hughie O’Donoghue’s engagement with photography shares some of these same qualities: the photograph as a starting point, the reworking of the original camera image, the staging of the subject, the use of props, the referencing of past art.
For O’Donoghue the photographic source has long been fundamental in re-imagining the past, making it his own and bringing to life events such as his father’s experiences in the Second World War. The degree to which these photographs have been integrated into a painting has always varied and now in his latest manifesto works, O’Donoghue even questions the very assumptions of veracity which have always been so fundamental to this incorporation of photography.
After many years of incorporating complex photographic scenes, these new paintings return to the single figure presented life-size. As the artist has recently stated: ‘painting the human figure is the absolute core of what I am about’. In presenting his narratives on human scale, or even slightly above, O’Donoghue new paintings, even when they have the same dimensions as earlier paintings, assume a dramatic new presence, scale, immediacy and drama.
This is particularly evident in the ying and yang of the two series that dominate the present exhibition, the striding male figure of the Yellow Man paintings and the prone woman in a small series that includes Blue Water, A Time Between and Stone Steps. These are elemental paintings, in which an active male figure inhabits a daytime world of earth and fire, and a passive woman dwells in a nocturnal realm of air and water.
O’Donoghue’s three epic Yellow Man paintings, and a series of related head studies, were ostensibly inspired by another of the nineteenth century’s great re-inventors of reality, Van Gogh, and specifically Van Gogh’s lost painting, The Painter on the Road to Tarascon, which was destroyed in the Second World War.
Van Gogh’s painting survives in colour photographs and fifty years ago one such reproduction provided the starting point for a small series of paintings by Francis Bacon.
O’Donoghue does not reference such antecedents to subvert or pastiche but does so sincerely. But this is no simple act of homage but something more complex.
As a painter O’Donoghue allies himself to these great re-makers of reality, but what, then, is one to make of the way he continues to make overt the inclusion of photography in these Yellow Man paintings? This issue is even greater when one considers its application in just one area: the face of the figure. One might assume given the painting that is referenced, that this might be one of the handful of known photographs of Van Gogh, or perhaps even an image of O’Donoghue, himself, a form of role-playing that would suggest a degree of self-identification with the subject. But no. Instead the photographic subject of this image of the painter on the way to work is a photograph of a Canadian serviceman. Having taken so much on trust in the artist’s previous engagement with photography, here one is abruptly made to challenge our assumptions about what is shown. We are made to question what we are seeing. Who is shown and what is he doing? Similarly in the painting The Prodigal Son – the first of these recent paintings to return to presenting the figure life –size - the source is overtly photographic in its origins: a depiction of a wounded German soldier awaiting a stretcher at Arras in the First World War. Yet when first exhibited alongside a text by the artist that narrated how his grandfather had left the family home in Cork in 1911, the painting took on a whole other resonance that spoke for the experiences of emigration and travel for generations of Irish families. Viewed in this way the Canadian Serviceman who masquerades as a Dutch artist striding along a rural lane in southern France, in O’Donoghue’s Yellow Man paintings, must surely also be that same Prodigal Son, that same iconic Irish traveller.
After many years painting actual events in which the photograph signified the verifiable truth we have entered a no less tangible world of imagined scenarios and dreams in which the photograph, is still crucial, but the artist as archivist has been replaced by the artist as cineaste directing his subjects in imagined roles.
No where is this more evident that in three paintings of the same prone young woman. Rather than striding forward, active and even confrontational, the woman is more passive, her eyes closed, turned inward. She may be asleep, dreaming perhaps, but she has clearly been posed. The staging is such that even her choice of clothes - a dress with a decorative floral motif - appears deliberate in its evocation of Shakespeare’s description of the drowned Ophelia.
There is a willow grows aslant a brook,
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream;
There with fantastic garlands did she come
Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them:
There, on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds
Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke;
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide;
And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up:
Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes;
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element: but long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull'd the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 4, scene 7
Here, as in the Yellow Man paintings, O’Donoghue references the art of past, in this case a painting by John Everett Millais, Ophelia (1851-51), that in its time was acclaimed as the epitome of realism.
Shakespeare’s ‘snatches of old tunes’ and ‘muddy death’ could embody any number of O’Donoghue’s paintings, from his pictures of peat bog men of thirty years ago to his preoccupation with the figure battling the elements. But what, then, are we to make of the fact that these remarkable pictures are almost the only female figures to appear in the artist’s whole oeuvre, and that the woman is identifiable as the artist’s own daughter?
In the past O’Donoghue often foregrounded the fact that the protagonist was his father, whilst arguing for his status as a talismanic Everyman figure, and in these latest works he achieves a similar duality. The identity of the subject is overt and the staging is obvious, yet so evident is this role-playing that there is an upsetting of certainties, a slippage in identity and shift in meaning. A soldier is also an artist; a healthy woman is also a drowned courtier. Fact and fiction, the living and the dead, reality and myth all collide and coalesce.
The paths taken by these new paintings suggest many new directions. After many years in which the artist’s father has been a key protagonist, they introduce a new cast. After years when the Second World War has been at the foreground, now it begins to recede: a catalyst but not the ostensible subject. And now there is a new gendering of the depiction that introduces a wholly new dimension to O’Donoghue’s symbolism: day and night, sun and moon, hot and cold, active and passive, male and female. The Yellow Man is solidly tethered to the land and inhabits a world of bright sunlight whilst the woman in A Time Between (Night Sleeper) drifts in a nocturnal world lit only by the moon.
The constructed narratives in these recent pictures are no longer so literal, no longer the telling of particular stories, as O’Donoghue questions the very assumptions upon which he has predicated so much of his painting over recent years. Action now combines with reflection, assertion with introspection and actual events with the world of dreams. Indeed the dreaming figure, whether male or female, is a theme that runs through several of these recent pictures: the Prodigal Son drift in and out of consciousness, the Night Sleeper floats off into a world of dreams and in a young man day dreams by The Fools House.
O’Donoghue’s early paintings sprang from myth, and then developed towards history, using family events to make this past his own. Now in these latest paintings O’Donoghue returns to myth but the tone is very different. Now, as never before, O’Donoghue exposes the artifice of their construction, the bones of their making - the partially integrated photograph, the inserted object, the direct reference to a previous painting, the explicit staging of the subject, the mythologising.
The recent paintings of Hughie O’Donoghue pose new challenges for the artist and ask fresh questions about the potential of painting. They also empower the viewer in new ways. After years in which photography was used to make explicit and artist’s texts to direct our response, these latest paintings have a new openness. These are defining works that mark a vital moment in the artist’s oeuvre, a moment of new possibilities and paths to follow. It is appropriate that at their heart should be paintings of the artist on a journey and of a world of dreams.