Works °5 — PATRICK GRAHAM

ssay by the artist; intro by Jack Rutberg

ISBN 978 0946641 222     32 pages (paperback)    20x15cm    18 illus

Jack Rutberg describes Paddy Graham as a reclusive ‘artist’s artist’, the strength of whose work rests in its ‘ability to speak in a private whisper’, while the artist himself describes his art practice in terms of his spirituality, truth and humanity, and his belief in the opportunity presented by lived experiences compared to the limitations imposed by an over-dependancy on the intellectual perspective.

EXTRACTS

"Born in Mullingar, Co Westmeath, in 1943, Patrick Graham’s remarkable talent for drawing was realised as a small child. At college, the burden of his ‘unearned gift’ bore heavily on Graham. At that time in Ireland’s academic environs, the notion that art as a vehicle for contemplation and personal expression was not yet considered. Graham continued battling with himself and the ‘emptiness’ of his art as mere facility of hand and craft. It was upon his first exposure to the works of Emil Nolde in a small exhibition in Dublin that Graham was riveted by the notion that an artist had licence to express so personally. Graham’s personal battle intensified as his conflict about Nolde’s work opposing the tenets of academia deteriorated into a dramatic war for sanity and survival. An important turning point came in 1974, with the public re-emergence of Patrick Graham in a solo exhibition entitled Notes from Mental Hospitals and Other Love Stories. From this point emerged the evolution of a new expression in the art of Ireland.
          Graham’s paintings convey a strength through form and composition which give way to an amazing fragile quality. They have none of the posturing seen in the ‘new expressionism’ of the 1980s. They are not consumed with the large gesture. Rather, their strength rests in their ability to speak in a private whisper ... To state that Graham’s paintings have had an unique effect on so many who have genuinely engaged them would be an understatement. It has been a wonder to me to observe so many deeply moved while engaged by a Patrick Graham exhibition. It reaffirms what art can do and should do."

— from the introduction by Jack Rutberg

"It is said in ancient Irish poetry and mythology that one of the ways to knowledge is the way of loneliness, otherwise ‘the hill of silence’. I don’t know what this knowledge might be, whether it is the knowing of things, or that things can be calculated, analysed and resolved like some mathematical equation, or the experiences of one’s existence that are catalogued by the heart and soul in a mute and waiting patient darkness. The only knowledge, wit or wisdom I have for now is that my paintings come from silence and a world of abandonment. In another world there is this wrestling and restless engagement with things such as aesthetics and truth in which I can sometimes aggressively articulate my experiences and carve them in stone as though unbreakable and, at the next turn, smash these tablets of truth with little regard for what, yesterday, was the law of belief. In this world of silence, no truth exists; there is the abandonment of power that truth manifestly becomes in that other world of dogma, ideology and aesthetic certainty. The silence becomes the painting, the painting comes from silence. It is the moment when painting is no longer an act of doing or making but of receiving. There is no ego shape here, no facilitative reply to aesthetic notions, whether historical or contemporary, there is only that desperate faith of the abandoned ... and there is the discovery and rediscovery of ‘Art’ which is exhilarating."

— from the essay by Paddy Graham