Profile °22 – DONALD TESKEY

essay by Aidan Dunne; interview by Mike Fitzpatrick; intro by Frank McGuinness 

ISBN 978 0948037 245     108 pages (paperback)     22.5x22.5cm    119 illus

This book is a retrospective look at the work of the painter Donald Teskey. It features and in-depth essay and extensive interview with this much-admired artist.

EXTRACTS

"If I could summon one ghost to see these paintings, it would be John Millington Synge – the Synge who created the verbal landscape of Mayo in The Playboy of the Western World as a dense, decipherable, shifting, subtle fierceness of language, caged in a unique syntax. I hope he would be happy to look on these paintings of that county’s coastline, for at long last his poetry and theatre have found their visual match in Donald Teskey’s work.
          Teskey strongly communicates that we live in an island country. His magnificent miniatures from Valentia reinforce that isolation. It is with a lovely irony that he is obsessed with painting a former convent called Stella Maris – Star of the Sea; he too guides us not merely along, but through to the heart of the earth on which we stand.
          This is an art which owes much to cartography; his drawings are X-rays of Ireland’s bones, maps to chart the paintings’ journeys and directions. But it owes even more to geology. History here is tidal, and it can be seen in cinematic swirls, letting the sea tell its tale in rapid, speeded sequence, attacking the land. It stands steadfast, responding to change in slow, barely perceivable action, captured only in the paint itself, paint that is like the charge of the great Atlantic, forming and deforming through its quakes of colour."

— from the introduction by Frank McGuinness

"For his latest body of work, Donald Teskey has cleared the decks. Gone is much of the pictorial paraphernalia familiar from earlier paintings: architectural scaffoldings in the form of tight networks of city streets, or, more recently, clusters of buildings around harbour walls. These essentially solid, sculptural frameworks are modelled by the fall of light. The combination of light and structure makes pathways for the viewer’s eyes, opening routes into the pictures’ intricate patterning. It’s easy to see, with hindsight, the way the canyon walls of city warehousing might resemble natural features, and prefigure the sea cliffs that became, unexpectedly, a source of inspiration for the artist in the late 1990s.
          Unexpectedly, because he had, until then, come across as an urban painter, securely and contentedly at home with a contained environment fabricated, and densely inhabited, by humans. On occasion, the latter put in an appearance, though peripherally, rushing past, turned away, heading somewhere out of frame. They added to a sense of windblown urgency in the images. Weather has always been an important factor in Teskey’s work. In early drawings, scraps of paper carried on the breeze are metaphors for what makes a picture quicken and breathe, something elusive, fleeting, precious. Content is a glimpse – as de Kooning memorably phrased it, ‘a slipping glimpse’. It could be that the quicksilver mobility of Irish light, watery but strong, constantly deflected and knocked about by fast-moving cloud cover, has since fulfilled this function. Certainly the light that swoops and rushes through the paintings is extraordinarily animate."

— from the essay by Aidan Dunne

"I’m after engagement when painting, the dialogue that evolves between the artist and the paint. The excitement in seeing an image emerge from the murky fog of confusion that exists at the beginning of a new painting is like a surge of electricity which propels you on. What begins then is a struggle for control. The will of the artist versus the will of the paint. This is where the dialogue begins. The artist uses all his skill of negotiation to maintain control, but the paint is intent on doing its own thing. It continues like this until one submits to the will of the other, or a stalemate occurs."

— Donald Teskey in conversation with Mike Fitzpatrick

Another in the very successful Gandon ‘Profile’ series ... His finest works are coastal landscapes – generally uncluttered by boats or dwelling places. And the latter subject appears to have unleashed a hitherto latent force in Teskey’s work. This undoubtedy is his metier. Art critic Aidan Dunne writes so very knowledgeably yet accessibly in the Teskey ‘Profile’.  — Marianne Hartigan, Books Ireland