Profile °25 – EAMON COLMAN

essays by Aidan Dunne, Brian McAvera; interview by Nigel Rolfe

intro by Theo Dorgan; afterword by Dermot Healy

ISBN 978 0948037 351     120 pages (paperback)     22.5x22.5cm    115 illus

This book is a retrospective exploration of the work of painter Eamon Colman. It features and in-depth essay and extensive interview with the artist.

EXTRACTS

"Colman is a walker. He walks the world down until the internal voice is quieted and he can see colour, feel space. He walks out into the world until his body remembers its proper home in the world, remembers that it is not separate from the world, and then in the stillness of the studio, the memory of sensory experiences gives rise to paintings that, in their turn, evoke in the viewer the same kind of delight in the fact of being alive in this world. When I stand before one of his paintings, I am conscious of being at home in my body, at one with my eye, dwelling on and in the colours and forms that have the whole of my attention. His paintings have what is sometimes called a dreamlike quality, but that’s a lazy term; better to say he sees the world as it falls on his eye, as if unmediated, and paints the world as he would like it to fall on your eye or mine. It is a replete and sensual experience, as full of itself and as sufficient to itself as any experience the delighted seeing body can have."

— from the introduction by Theo Dorgan

"As a painter, Eamon Colman is unmistakably a colourist. Not only because colour – often strong, bright colour – is a major constituent in terms of the formal pictorial construction of his compositions, but also because he expects the qualities inherent in colour to do a substantial part of the emotional work he sees as integral to the painting process. Look at practically any of his pictures, though, and it is clear that he is not solely a colourist. In fact, he consistently uses the classical components of painterly language – line, colour, tone and form – to which one might add a pronounced leaning towards pattern.
          As it happens, colour allied to pattern together make up a workable set of pictorial means. Just look at most of Howard Hodgkin’s pictures. Hodgkin is a painter who Colman admires, for several pertinent reasons. His faith in the emotional weight of colour, and his appreciation of the usefulness of pattern as a fundamental pictorial building block are clearly relevant, but so too is his commitment to pictorial narrative. Colman shares all of these attitudes and feelings. To a degree that might surprise many casual observers, Colman, like Hodgkin, is convinced that every picture tells a story, though not necessarily in the way, and not necessarily the kind of story, that we might expect."

— from the essay by Aidan Dunne

"I think that fundamentally I am a storyteller; that’s my initial spark. It’s where the political comes into it. I’m very aware that people need to be able to tell their own stories, and, through the telling of their stories, their livelihoods, their way of interacting with the landscape, all feeds back into the work. This painting Made before morning, sheltered time is based loosely on crosses and the idea of going to a cross to tie your woe. You’ll find that all around Co Kilkenny there are crosses that have schoolbooks from kids doing their exams or people with ailments. Each of them ties their little symbol onto the cross, and it’s that link to the past and pagan times I’m fascinated with."

— Eamon Colman in conversation with Nigel Rolfe