Profile °5 – MARY LOHAN

essay by Noel Sheridan; intro and interview by Aidan Dunne

ISBN 978 0946641 888    48pp (pb)     22.5 x 22.5 cm    22 illus (incl 21 col) 

Mary Lohan is known for her landscapes and seascapes. They are landscapes that are contained by the viewer rather than their location. In this book, we glean an insight into what the process of painting means to the artist, how certain landscapes have informed her work, her early training as an artist, and the gradual unfolding of her career. Her very particular use of paint, the increasing thickness of it, and the underlying contradictions that emerge from the combination of her technique and her subject matter are integral to her work.

EXTRACTS

"Underlying the sheer weight of pigment in the paintings, there is an awareness of ceaseless change: the tides vary in their daily cycle, the clouds crank across the sky, one season gives ground to the next. And the sum of these myriad, interconnected shifts and cycles is a perpetual restlessness. Light and shadow, colour, texture, mass, mood itself are in a state of flux. Looking at any particular painting, you’re aware that numerous drafts are fixed in its mass of underlying and up-ended layers, like rock strata. It’s a nexus of processes that happens to be stilled in one particular configuration, shaped, perhaps, by something as evanescent as a flicker of light bouncing off the wave peaks, the glistening rocks, the flat estuarine muds. Sculptural impasto sets fugitive details as if they have been cast in bronze. But when a painting arrives at its destination, though it’s there to stay, there is still an intimation of transience. Natural mutability finds a counterpart in the potential plasticity of the paint surface... . 
          Perhaps one of the things Lohan’s paintings do is to appeal to a certain shared way of viewing landscape, one that is tied up with memory in a general sense, in the popular imagination. For many people, coastal landscapes are privileged through their specific association with holidays, summer and freedom. Of course, there are a whole range of other associations; for example, the sea is also immensely threatening. But the shore is overwhelmingly an imaginative threshold, not a place of escape, but one of confrontation with self. In positing an openness to environment, an unrestrained curiosity, the paintings in some way echo the way a child can relate to landscape – as a realm of pure possibility."

— from the essay by Aidan Dunne

"When my sister started going out with a Donegal man – whom she eventually married – I was in my teens, and we would go to Donegal on visits. But, strange as it may seem, I never thought of it as being the country, never mind in terms of painting. It was just a hugely social place; we went to have a ball. The truth is that I never really saw the landscape until I was in my late twenties or early thirties. Until you’re ready for something you just won’t see it; it won’t mean anything to you. I only begin to know things when they come to me in some personal way, when they become important to me and I want to know. And, although Donegal has been an important source for me, again I don’t actually have a strong emotional or sentimental identification with a particular landscape. It seems to me that the association between yourself and landscape is changing all the time. I don’t see the landscape as an absolute, unvarying source, and the work is really about that evolving relationship rather than about the landscape in itself."

— Mary Lohan in conversation with Noel Sheridan