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JAMES HYMAN GALLERY
Hughie O'Donoghue (b.1953)
Please scroll down for further information. Hughie O'Donoghue (b.1953) Yellow Man I (head) Oil on linen canvas 48 x 56 cms (19 x 22 inches) 2008 Hughie O’Donoghue’s Yellow Man paintings 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 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. James Hyman Gallery This item is sold. Please click here if you wish to buy or sell a work by this artist. | ||||||||
