CECILY BRENNAN - Irish Arts Review

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
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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