CECILY BRENNAN - Irish Arts Review

Cecily Brennan, one of the foremost
Irish landscape painters of her
generation, seldom - if ever - paints
out of doors. This, quite simply, is
because she believes that too great a
concern with naturalism would jeopard
ize the expression of the 'sense of place'
that is central to her work. But Bren
nan's landscapes are not imaginary like,
say, Michael Mulcahy's, which use the
'props' of a given environment to flesh
out the artist's psychological dramas.
The thrust of Brennan's painting is
founded on a confrontation between
subjective vision and physical reality.
The strength of her images, particularly
in the last year or two, stems from the
fact that the viewer cannot readily
determine where ideas and feelings end
and the natural landscape begins.
Other young artists - Therese Oulton
and Peter Lewis in England, for example
- are quarrying the same vein, and there
is a growing number of landscape paint
ers whose work is as much rooted in
personal experience as in observation of
nature. This attitude, of course, is far
from novel; in Ireland, artists like Barrie
Cooke, Sean MacSweeney and Patrick
Collins capture moods and essences at
least as convincingly as they depict
specific locations. But Brennan's two
series of paintings are thoroughly in
dividual; both the early Wicklow land
scapes, which are about open spaces and
the way man has effected changes in
wild terrain, and the more recent'Paint
ings from a Rhododendron Garden',
which investigate the artist's responses
to a particular place, are stamped with
her own personality. The latter evoke a
sense of passion, desire, and a need for
completeness; the Wicklow views are
suggestive of estrangement and alien
ation. They are all, however, related to
aspects of the Romantic tradition.
Yet the demands that Brennan's work
make of the viewer are decidedly of our
own time, and her images cause us
to question our personal assumptions
and preconceptions. Most of us, for
instance, (certainly the majority of
those who look closely at her paintings)
are alienated from the land. We don't
view the land in the same way as the
farmer or the agricultural labourer
would. To urban man, the landscape is
a complex of associations, some of them
mundane and straight-forward, others
sentimental and mythical. It is the last
IRISH ARTS REVIEW
CECILY BRENNAN
Irish art historian,
John Hutchinson, writes
about the work of the painter
Cecily Brennan which has
attracted much attention since
the outstanding critical and
commercial success of her first
exhibition in Dublin only
four years ago.
The artist in her studio.
of these which neo-Romantic landscape
painters, of whom Cecily Brennan is
one, choose to explore.
Brennan's first exhibition, at the
Project Gallery in 1982, launched her
career with unusual panache. Not alone
was the show a critical success, but all
the paintings and drawings were sold,
clearly on the basis of the quality of
the work, not on her reputation. The
landscapes, many of them very large,
were all views in Co. Wicklow, where
the artist was then living; most were
'bird's-eye' views, seen from a distance
and from a great height. This made
them oddly reminiscent of those early
eighteenth century landscapes whose
topographical clarity and 'God's-eye'
perspective reflected the landownerse
ownership and control of the terrain.
And there was another parallel with the
past: Brennan, like her Georgian pre
decessors, showed the way in which the
landscape had been changed by man.
The eighteenth century paintings were
designed to demonstrate how the land
-41
owners had improved the land, taming it
and bringing it under enlightened super
vision, but Brennan was concerned with
the interaction of man and the landscape
- the way nature's 'Romanticism' is
tempered by the ordered 'Classicism' of
turf-cutting, fire-breaks, and Forestry
Commission tree plantations. In her
Wicklow images, these two principles
keep each other in check, neither
dominating the other. In 'Path and
Forest' (1981), nature seems to rebel
against man's imposed order. The
roughly brushed yellow paths 'burn'
with vitality, and the tiny green fir-trees
appear to be about to break their
serried ranks.
At times, these landscapes verge on
the symbolic, in 'Lough Tay (1981),
the lake has a shape that bears some
resemblance to a phoenix, and the river
that feeds it is not unlike a serpent,
which makes the image suggestive of
fertility and rebirth. The large graphite
drawing, 'Forest and Firebreak' (1981),
can even be read as a sexual metaphor;
the lower part, a dense black mat of
trees, split in two by a firebreak, is
gently penetrated by a vertical line of
firs. This huge work, besides foreshad
owing the implied sexuality of her
later paintings, was among the most
innovative pieces in the Project show.
Its scale and vertiginous viewpoint
induce a sensation akin to eighteenth
century 'Sublimity' - although it is
created not by placing a human being at
the foot of a towering peak, but by
situating the viewer far above the
landscape. This was a nice twist of con
vention, repeated throughout the series;
it brings to mind contemporary exper
iences of great height, such as air-traveL
In its monochrome austerity, there is
something decidedly Oriental about
'Forest and Firebreak', despite the ner
vous, scratchy lines so densely applied
that the graphite became shiny.
Although the Wicklow works were
founded on direct perception of nature,
they were also composed of the artistes
responses to the landscape. As such,
they suggested a sense of self-loss
through absorption in space and expan
siveness, an attitude that also has prece
dents in Romantic painting. But when
Brennan left Co. Wicklow and returned
to live in Dublin, this characteristic
disappeared from her images. Initially,
the absence of the environment that she
Irish Arts Review
is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve, and extend access to
Irish Arts Review 1984 1987 ®
www.jstor.org

I
.' I - 0*
0 . u.s

9
i
i SN
.1~~~~~~~~~~~1
. x,.*20 .$Y AS." ~ ~
lli1 M L.I

had come to know so intimately, shook
her confidence, for the occasional pic
tures that surfaced at exhibitions after
the Project show were tentative and
indecisive. The majority of them,
inspired by the Iveagh Gardens off St.
Stephen's Green, were low- keyed efforts,
none of them even hinting at the extra
ordinary burst of energy and colour that
sprang from the canvases at her second
solo exhibition in 1985, this time at the
Taylor Galleries.
Cecily Brennan's second show could
scarcely have differed more substantially
from her first. If one of the limitations
of the early work had been its dry,
acrylic paint surfaces, she went to the
other extreme in 'Paintings from a
Rhododendron Garden'. The new pic
tures were uniformly lush in texture,
fluidly covered with oil pigment. But a
more significant innovation was a shift
from an extroverted to an introverted
attitude to her subject-matter. These
landscapes were more abstracted and
internalized than before. The quiet
detachment that characterized the
Wicklow pictures was replaced by a
sensuous relish of colour and form,
which related them distantly to Monet's
joyous Giverny garden paintings. Bren
nan's 'Rhododendron' series is about
growth, passion, and the source of life
itself.
However did the artist set about
achieving this? The paint was brushed
on flatly, each area of the painting flow
ing into another, thus unifying the
image and creating a feeling of ease and
immediacy. Frequently the viewer is
drawn further into the picture, into a
kind of vortex, by means of loose spiral
forms - as in the majestic 'Pathway'
(1985). The colours are softly applied
and warm in hue, often flickering like
flames against a dark background. There
were, admittedly, some formal parallels
with the Wicklow views - the drawings,
with their broken rhythms and 'bird's
eye' viewpoints, were transitional works
- but the overall impression of the
IRISH ARTS REVIEW
CECILY BRENNAN
show was of a new beginning, of a dif
ferent technique being used to express
fresh ideas.
The 'Rhododendron Garden' paint
ings were the result of prolonged
exposure to a single place; they are
about essences, not particulars. And
although they may look free and
instinctive, they are, in fact, reflective
compositions. The images allude to the
subject and are not actually descriptive;
their fluidity extends as much to con
tent as to form. Indeed, once one
begins to examine these paintings close
ly, one is hard put to it positively to
identify a single element they contain.
Brennan's realism (for these pictures are
not just figments) embraces her own
emotions as well as perceptible pheno
mena. The struggle between these two
aspects of her work is captivating when
it is forceful, as it usually is, but it also
accounts for one of her main weakness
es. If the tension between the subjective
and objective slackens, or if it is not
sustained throughout the whole image,
the paintings lapse into merely decora
tive abstraction.
It is revealing, I think, that Cecily
Brennan should have chosen a garden
as a source of inspiration, for in some
respects it was the very opposite of the
natural landscape that fascinated her
before. Yet it can be argued that she
was always as much interested in man's
involvement with the land as with the
mountains and lakes themselves, and
in that sense her absorption in the
rhododendron garden in Howth is an
extension, rather than a reversal, of
her earlier concerns. If a garden is an
example of nature under control, Bren
nan's violates its boundaries; if a garden
is a kind of discreet space between the
intimacy of a home and the threatening
world outside, Brennan's rose-tree
world is the most personal space
imaginable. So the artist's awe of the
power of nature still remains.
Even in the most carefully mastered
gardens the indomitable energy of
-44
nature is at work; horticulture may be a
symbolic attempt to control it, but
unless you resort to drastic violence,
the best you can hope to achieve is a
rough and ready compromise. Brennan,
however, has no time for contrived
conciliations. Her gardens are secret
sources of life, secluded paradises. The
Biblical Eden was a paradise where a
talking serpent brought about the
replacement of the act of creation by
one of generation; it is an unambiguous
lesson about the seductive side of
nature. In contrast, Persian classical
gardens, also known as 'paradises', were
deliberately constructed as erotic enclo
sures. Brennan's'Rhodendron Gardens',
with their womb-like interiors and
colourful flambeaux of flowers, revive
that notion, not overtly, but through
allusion. Translate the mediaeval court
ly images of 'La Dame et L'Unicorne',
with all their repressed sexuality, into
our own age of abstraction and relati
vity, and you might end up with paint
ings such as these. Only now they're
painted by a woman, not by men.
'Paintings from a Rhododendron
Garden', because of their implicit sex
uality, suggest desire, not fulfilment,
absence, not presence. It is fitting, then,
that the predominant motif in the series
is a flame - the pictures are full of
lambent, wavering shapes that are
forever poised on the edge of dissolut
ion. Fire, of course, is tantalizingly close
to being pure energy; although visible
and tangible, it cannot be held or
imprisoned, because flames are the
effect, not the cause of combustion.
And fire is a powerful metaphor. For
instance, as Gaston Bachelard has
observed, fire symbolizes "the need to
penetrate, to go to the interior of
things, to the interior of beings." This
is equally true of 'Paintings from a
Rhododendron Garden', which turn the
key in the gate of a luxuriant 'inner
sanctum'.
John Hutchinson