Artist by the sea: the paintings of Mary Lohan
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Transcript of Artist by the sea: the paintings of Mary Lohan
Irish Arts Review
Artist by the sea: the paintings of Mary LohanAuthor(s): Catherine MarshallSource: Irish Arts Review (2002-), Vol. 29, No. 2 (SUMMER [JUNE - AUGUST 2012]), pp. 58-59Published by: Irish Arts ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23278181 .
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SUMMER 2012
EXHIBITION
Artist by
the paintings
the sea:
of Mary Lohan
mind Tony O'Malley's description of
himself; 'I am only the person who
wants to go down to the King's river
and make a drawing of the river there
....I am only this." Lohan has been
producing distinctive canvases and
prints of the Irish coastline, particu
larly the coasts of Donegal, Mayo and
Wexford for decades, working always
within a deliberately restricted the
matic and an equally restricted
methodology, yet somehow always
managing to avoid the formulaic,
constantly offering a taste of fresh
experience and a new confrontation
with the sublime.
It will come as no surprise then that
her new work for the Hamilton
Gallery in Sligo is also about the sea,
although on this occasion there is a
marked move in the direction of
greater figuration. Lest anyone con
fuse figuration with the human body,
think again. The figure in Lohan's
work is the Irish land/seascape, with
rather more of the land now, and less
of the sea, than heretofore, but in all
of her work the human presence, in
the person of the artist/viewer, is an
unspoken constant, and the
land/seascape is the sublime 'other'
against which the viewer must perpet
ually define him/herself. In presenting his greatest statement
of the sublime, Monk by the Sea
(1809) Caspar David Friedrich offered
a canvas with three, sweeping,
roughly horizontal bands; sky, sea and
sand. The unobservant might miss the
small figure of the monk, from whom
the painting gets its title, so insignifi
cant is he in relation to the forces of
nature. Robert Rosenblum famously
identified this painting as a landmark
along the road to abstraction, and
Within a deliberately restricted theme, Mary Lohan offers a new
confrontation with the sublime, writes Catherine Marshall ahead
of the artist's exhibition at the Hamilton Gallery, Sligo, in June
Mary
Lohan is a contempo
rary artist. She does not
easily fit the descriptions
'conceptual', or 'expressionist'; it is
difficult to describe her as Modernist,
not to mention a post-modernist. Yet
she certainly could not with any credi
bility be described as academic either,
and to cap it all, she paints the same
theme with only relatively small varia
tion over and over again and has done
so for twenty years now. Yet her work
is widely admired, even loved by art
audiences across the whole spectrum
of gallery-goers and collectors. Her
concentration on her painting calls to
58 IRISH ARTS REVIEW I SUMMER 2012
Artist by the sea:
the paintings of Mary Lohan
Catherine Marshall i
This content downloaded from 185.44.78.13 on Tue, 10 Jun 2014 10:34:44 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
2
BATHING ALL THE NATURAL ELEMENTS REPRESENTED IN A GLOW OF LIGHT THAT PULLS THEM TOGETHER RATHER THAN DEFINES THEIR DIFFERENCE, SHE PLAYS WITH CONVENTIONS OF COLOUR-FIELD ABSTRACTION
has, radically, drawn similarities
between it and the colour-field paint
ings of Mark Rothko.2 It is not as fan
ciful as it might seem to look at Mary
Lohan's paintings with Friedrich and
Rothko in mind. Although Lohan
does not insert a human presence to
represent us in the picture as Friedrich
1 MARY LOHAN b.1954 SEAFIELDSI 2012 oil on gesso panel A0x50cm
2 SEAFIELDSIV 2012 oil on canvas 30x30cm
3 SEAFIELDS V 2012 oil on canvas 30x30cm
did, her textured surfaces project
into our space and draw us, directly
and tangibly, into the picture. By
blurring the distinctions between the
different elements in her seascapes,
or bathing all the natural elements
represented in a glow of light that
pulls them together rather than
defines their difference, she plays
with conventions of colour-field
abstraction without ever subscribing
to it. She goes further with her
polyptychs, created by painting sepa
rate stretched canvases as one unit
and then pulling them apart so that
her impastoed paint reaches across
the void from one panel to another,
presenting a completely new spatial
dynamic that the viewer must engage
with, turning the paintings into
installations that interact with their
surroundings, making the painting
the ground for a drama that impli
cates both viewer and space. Writing
to Brian Kennedy about Rothko,
Sean Scully said, 'I'm very attracted
to his [Rothko's] relationship with
abstract art. Not the fluid style of his
abstraction, but its relationship with
the figurative. Even in his most res
olutely abstract work the memory of
the figure is embedded into the sur
face." In Mary Lohan's paintings, we
are embedded participants.
Her canvases are modestly scaled
but they still point to the sublime.
The horizon line can be low, so that
the viewer hovers above it, some
times it is so high that you are
sucked right into the muddy,
encrusted land itself, frequently it is
blurred so that you can't locate your
self within it. Lohan never subscribes
to the Irish tradition of mythologiz
ing the western coastline either, so
we can't fall back on that to find our
feet. Instead no matter which sce
nario we are presented with, we are
obliged to deal with the dislocation
on our own. There are no proxies
from folklore or history to help us,
only contemporary painting.■
All images ©The Artist. Photography Davey Moor.
Mary Lohan 'New Paintings' Hamilton Gallery, Sligo 7-30 June 2012.
Catherine Marshall is co-editor of Volume V, five-volume Art and Architecture of Ireland, Royal Irish Academy, forthcoming.
1 B. Lynch (Ed) Tony O'Malley, 1996 pM. 2 R. Rosenblum, Modern Painting and the
Northern Romantic Tradition-, Friedrich to
Rothko, London, 1975, pp .10-11. 3 B. Kennedy, Sean Scully, Body of Light, 2006,
P 72.
SUMMER 2012 I IRISH ARTS REVIEW 59
1 MARY LOHAN b.1954 SEAFIELDSI2012 oil on gesso panel 40x50cm
2 5EAFIELDSIV 2012 oil on canvas 30x30cm
3 SEAFIELDS V 2012 oil on canvas 30x30cm
1 B. Lynch (Ed) Tony O'Malley, 1996 pM. 2 R. Rosenblum, Modern Painting and the
Northern Romantic Tradition-, Friedrich to
Rothko, London, 1975, pp .10-11. 3 B. Kennedy, Sean Scully, Body of Light, 2006,
P 72.
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