Profile °12 – JAMES SCANLON

essay by Aidan Dunne; interview by Shane O’Toole; afterword by Mark Patrick Hederman

ISBN 978 0946641 574     48 pages (paperback)      22.5x22.5cm     51 illus

James Scanlon is a hugely imaginative artist who produces sumptuous and intricate stained-glass artworks. He is also known for his environmental artworks, the most familiar being his stone and glass ‘beehive’ huts in Sneem, Co Kerry. Aidan Dunne provides a thoroughly illuminating essay, describing how the formidable convictions held by the artist find their way into his work, and explaining his instinctive and providential approach to locating his work within the landscape. In an interview with Shane O’Toole, Scanlon explains his relationship to glass and what inspires him to push it right to the boundaries of its capabilities and beyond. The struggle involved in bringing works such as the Icon Chapel in Glenstal Abbey, Co Limerick, to completion reveals the role the artist can play in the creation of a thing of extraordinary beauty, and how Scanlon allows himself to be directed by the spiritual dimension of his work.

EXTRACTS

"Any discussion of James Scanlon’s work as a whole is likely to run into difficulties, because piecemeal analysis of its various and diverse parts seems to miss the larger, cumulative point, and can lead off on one tangent after another. It is clear, for example, that he is a brilliant stained glass artist, and that he has been technically adventurous and innovative, as well as being thematically adventurous, in his treatment of the medium. To say that he has worked in glass with a painterly freedom is not to disparage the conventions of stained glass, but merely to point out that he has pushed its limits, largely – as he would happily admit himself – out of his initial ignorance of them. Yet to treat him as the important stained glass artist that he certainly is actually sells him short."

— from the essay by Aidan Dunne

"I have come to know that James Scanlon is an iconographer. He does what he is told to do by the Spirit, and he has all the imagination and technical virtuosity to make happen their combined projects. The Icon Chapel in Glenstal is itself an icon. It is one of the visible proofs of the existence of God. It is the kind of beauty, as Dostoievsky says, that can save the world."

— from the afterword by Mark Patrick Hederman

"I know when I have a good sheet of glass in my hand that I have a chance there’s going to be a good result. I know from the minute the acid hits it, the way it responds, whether it’s going to work out or not. The amount of time you leave it on it. The way you tilt it, the way you tilt it off it. The way you wash it off, the way you don’t wash it off. The way you go back at it the second time. You might use wax the second time, you might use plastic. You might use plastic and wax. I’d often use fat from a frying pan, to get splashes of stuff and to get subtleties that you’d never get with plastic or with wax either. Even the sweat of your finger will stop it for a fraction of a second."

— James Scanlon in conversation with Shane O’Toole