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Fenton Gallery: Hughie O'Donoghue
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Hughie O'Donoghue at the Fenton Gallery
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Hughie O’Donoghue at the Fenton Gallery
Exhibition Continues until March 10th
The Fenton Gallery is excited to launch a new series of paintings ‘ Parable of the Prodigal Son’ by the internationally acclaimed artist - Hughie O’ Donoghue, to coincide with Cork’s year as European Capital of Culture.
‘ Parable of the Prodigal Son’ is O’Donoghue’s first full scale exhibition of works in Ireland since Naming the Fields in 2001. Like that series of paintings these new works have their foundation in and take inspiration from an Ireland of memory and myth. They also continue O’Donoghue’s long preoccupation with history. A chance discovery in 2002 by Hughie O’Donoghue of some old glass plate negatives from early 20th century Ireland on a stall at a car boot sale outside of Kilkenny sowed the beginnings of the idea to make this new group of paintings - Parable of the Prodigal Son. His interest was aroused as he poured over the images trying to imagine the lives of the people portrayed.
He would return again and again to one particular image- that of the young man standing next to his machine for crushing turnips in his Sunday best clothes. It is formally beautiful and looked to him like a photograph that the great German photographer August Sander might have taken as part of his project to record the Citizens of the 20th Century. The story of the Prodigal Son kept coming to mind, though later O’Donoghue decided that the boy looked more like the dutiful son. Because the glass plate photographs were so evocative of their time the other images they suggested were those of the muddy wastes of the Western front and Passchendaele in particular. He went to the Imperial War Museum photographic archive to look for images from 1917. He also used his own archive of photographs - a double exposure taken accidentally by his father in Mayo in the 1950’s. An image of pigs at a trough is superimposed on to that of a ploughman and his horse.
Other things fed into and propelled the work along. An RTE television Prime Time documentary about the elderly Irish in Britain for example. He also drew heavily on his memories of his grandfather who left Ireland from Cork in 1911 and conversations he had with him particularly in 1964/5 when O’Donoghue went to a school near Ardwick in Manchester where his grandfather lived.
O’Donoghue sees his working process as being similar to the process of drawing in that you are looking at something and re-presenting it in as direct a way as you can. In his working method there is a balance between action and contemplation, ‘..the old alchemical division between laboratory and library, only in my case the laboratory is a painting studio’ is how he describes it.. Although his subject is not something he can place in front of himself like a vase of flowers or a model he nevertheless has to immerse himself in it and know it intimately. Drawing was traditionally used by artists to inform themselves about their subject and so the research and the writing, the looking at photographs and maps, checking dates etc is all a kind of drawing. In this way the themes and motifs of the paintings emerge. - The man lying on the ground who has withdrawn into himself, immersed in his memories of the past. The muddy ground, the quagmire, the place that it is difficult to extricate oneself from. The railway stations and the trains. The means and the emblems of the journey. The pigs and the Beta Vulgaris, signifiers of untamed nature.
An illustrated Publication made to accompany this exhibition will be available end of January 2005 with an essay and notes by Hughie O’Donoghue.
Upcoming Exhibition – Sean Scully - Opening March 18th.
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