Hughie O’Donoghue
Another to add to my ‘not to be forgotten’ list of artist’s is Hughie O’Donoghue, I saw the ‘Richer Dust’ exhibition of O’Donoghue’s work at the Djanogly Art Gallery in Nottingham in Late 2001.
“Born in Manchester in 1953, O’Donoghue completed an
MA in Fine Art at Goldsmith’s College, later becoming an Artist in Residence at
the National Gallery, London. His work varies enormously, both in its size and media – from postcard-size to huge canvases, he utilizes and combines
photography, painting and drawing. Memory, myth and history are all central
themes in his work. Whether painting the landscape around his studio in Ireland
or manipulating photographs of his father’s movements during WWII, he transforms
his subjects into a kind of painterly scrapbook of imagery. Heavily applied oil
paints adhere O’Donoghue’s blown-up photographs to canvases, encrusting and
lapping over their edges. This mix of media transforms the artist’s snapshots of
animals, pathways, landscapes and people into visions; held within thick clouds
and swathes of colour that can both meander across the surface of the work, and
delineate certain objects and forms. His large compositions reflect such
masterpieces of history painting as The Raft of The Medusa – slumped
and recumbent bodies floating within broad expanses of dark paint. Smaller
works, such as the two in the Fragments room, often deal with the
figure, submerged and half visible within the paint. These bodies hang suspended
as if under water, or encased by a type of ozone that usually occupies the dark
moments of dreams and the imagination. Making bodies translucent and paint a
thin veil of material, these hemmed-in compositions provoke feelings of drowning
and entrapment.Most interesting about O’Donoghue’s paintings is his
combining of the traditional techniques of perspective and landscape painting
with an austere and formalist mark-making process. Vanishing points are
constructed on the horizons and meeting points between certain fields of colour,
and hues change from red to blue to denote recession into depth. However, mixed
with this are scratched lines and arcs that scar the very surface of the work.
These act as compositional ties which transport the eye between each fragmented
image and area of colour, and allow the works to flip between descriptions of
depth and marked wall-like surfaces. O’Donoghue seems to dredge the surface of
his paintings, layering fragments of raw colour and the familiar faces of real
people, smearing these media into one another and visually picking them out by a
process of painterly excavation.
Combining his treatment of paint with his serial use
of photographic memories from Ireland and his father’s past, O’Donoghue’s works
occupy a tense position between pure expression and records of factual events;
drawn as much from the workings of his simultaneously nostalgic and sinister
imagination as from the real lives of his subjects.”
I’m not familiar with this artist, and I like what you’ve shown. He seems like an interesting painter. Thanks for this post.
Thanks. I’ve only seen his work the once: but have often thought about the paintings since then.