BRIAN BALLARD – Paintings 1964-2014

essay by Marianne O’Kane Boal, reflections by Ciaran Carson

ISBN 978 1910140 055     168pp (hardback)   22.5x22.5cm   170 illus

This handsome hardback book on the artist Brian Ballard was published to coincide with a major retrospective of his work held at the Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast, at the end of 2014. Over the past fifty years, Brian Ballard has carved out a reputation as a leading Northern Irish artist, and this book is a comprehensive survey of his career.

When starting out as an artist, Ballard was described as one of the most promising painters of his generation by Kenneth Jamison. Since then his work has progressed from figuration to abstraction and back to figuration. The city of Belfast, its streets, avenues and the River Lagan all feature prominently. With an essay written by Marianne O’Kane Boal and reflections on many of the paintings by the poet Ciaran Carson, this fascinating book covers all strands of the artist’s practice – abstract paintings, figure studies, still life, landscape and portraiture. It is a feast of colour, vitality and interest.

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EXTRACTS

"Ballard’s still-life works from the mid to late eighties are intricate and complex compositional arrangements. They have a great deal happening within them, but the balance of objects, space and background is perfectly orchestrated. His palette at this time is a delightful mix of moody autumnal colours. Paintings such as Still Life with Green Vase (1985) and Bowl of Fruit (1988) contain a suggestion of narrative and drama. Elements, particularly the flowers in vases, are impressionistically treated. The backdrops are intriguing – mirrors, windows, doors, floorboards. The viewer feels as if they can literally step into the canvas and navigate the interior space. More intimate works, such as Dark Vase (1985) and Orchids in Vase (1986), hone in on a few carefully selected flowers within a vase. In these works there is a definite sense of elevating the status of the everyday and looking more closely at the overlooked or more ephemeral aspects of life. Leo Tolstoy talked about creative talent and ‘the gift of seeing what others have not seen’; the artist can draw our attention to those things we take for granted and encourage us to look again and closely."

— from the essay by Marianne O’Kane Boal

"I cannot look at a smoothing-iron without remembering its dead heavy weight when handled, or its being heated on a cast-iron gas stove some sixty years ago, poised on a coronet of blue flame. There is a smell of blue starch in the air and a hiss of blue steam as my mother glides and guides the prow of the iron over the white sheets, easing out the wrinkles. Thus time passes. The yellow here is a hot yellow on which the upright iron casts a shadow of bottle green, a shadow of whatever time. How long the iron has been standing there, I do not know. How old it is I do not know. There is something ecclesiastical in its profile, the arch of a gothic window, the wrought scroll of its handle. We cannot help but bring to a painting what is not in the painting. The dead weight of my mother’s coffin on my shoulder."

— a reflection by Ciaran Carson