ART What lies beneath

The Red Door by Eugene Conway oil on linen courtesy the artist and Gormleys.ie

LOOKING at things, at toys and teapots, and drawing and doodling them, was how it began for Eugene Conway.

“At school back then, art wasn’t taken seriously. There was no real art teacher as such; it was a convent and nuns ended up teaching art, but they were encouraging when they saw you liked the subject.”

But art was in the family. Conway’s maternal grandfather, an army commandant, painted backdrops for the barracks families’ pantomimes, and his mother was very good at drawing.

When Conway was four, the family moved from Dublin to rural Kilkenny. His father, a Kilkenny man, left a Guinness job and returned to farming. “There were ten of us, so being down the country gave us a lot of freedom.” And though Conway did still lifes and portraits, when he could persuade his sister Elaine to sit for him — “poor girl was frustrated as it used to take a couple of days” — it is the Kilkenny landscape that has provided Conway with his main subject matter.

After school, Conway did carpentry first and went to NCAD as a mature student. “The programme basically seemed to strip you of your preconceptions, start afresh, look at things differently, bring out your individuality.” He met the portrait painter James Hanley, also a mature student, who loved life drawing and painting “and we became very good friends”.

Representative and realist art always interested him, “but Van Gogh’s genius, colour palette created vibrant paintings and Lucian Freud’s manipulation of paint to create, close up, solidity, weight, form, have a lovely abstract quality. Artist-teachers Mick O’Dea and Carey Clarke helped to focus our skills of observation and colour.”

“Just driving around the landscape” provided the material for his new show at Gormleys Fine Art: barns, bridges, cottages, forests, water lilies, roads, in all seasons.

“The places I paint are not obviously beautiful, just ordinary scenes. The Spanish artist Antonio Lopez Garcia paints bathrooms, ordinary rooms, but they are beautifully rendered. It’s how he sees them that makes them so beautiful.”

So too with Eugene Conway. He paints the outdoors. Pretty pictures they are not, but they contain a convincing beauty.

In this work, The Red Door, the farm house, “on the side of the road, is in a place called Bilbo in north Kilkenny”.

Painted this spring, the old, broken, empty farmhouse is only partly revealed. The right-hand side of the painting shows untended land, and every detail — the fir trees, the bare branches, the light and shadows — is brilliantly done.

In the distance, farmed hillsides and a red-roofed, middle-distanced barn can be seen just at the right-hand edge; in the foreground, an ivy- and moss-covered stone wall, a grassy long acre. Sketches and photographs help him “get as much visual information for my subject”.

The red door is faded. The house is deserted. “When I was painting it, I would imagine its history. Was there a big family or small family who lived there? Did the siblings emigrate or do they live nearby? Was it a happy environment? Who was the last to live there? I love the old stonework and the structure of the building against the natural environment and the wildness of nature gradually taking over.”

Does he think his work raises awareness? Is it a record of social change?

“Some places in rural Ireland are ignored. People drift to the city for work and social life, and the small towns and villages inevitably suffer.”

But living in the country, a “slower, less stressful life”, suits Conway. A quintessentially Irish artist, he lived for years in New England. “The autumn and winters are beautiful over there, lovely crisp light, glorious autumn colours, wooden-clad houses.”

And did he paint all that beauty? He painted all right, but “I painted houses using ladders”.

Solo Show At Gormleys Fine Art, 27 Frederick St South, Dublin 2. Until July 18. www.gormleysfineart.ie