Artist Biography & Facts

Ronan Walsh

Following is an exhibition review from Camargue: culture northernireland.org, 11/30/2009

Ronan Walsh's work retains a tension between abstraction and figuration that recalls the work of Jack B Yeats in moments like The Singing Horseman and abstract expressionists like Willem de Kooning. There is the same vigorous, thickly applied paint and scenes where subjective expression overrides careful or conservative rendering of the subject.

De Kooning played with the female form, allowing the paint to gesture at her figuration, but ultimately sacrificing her to the abstraction of loose brushstrokes and skeins of colour. Dublin-born Walsh is a romantic abstract painter and does something similar with his skewed outlines of horses and landscapes. He is perhaps temperamentally closer to Yeats, his brushstrokes suggesting a more lyrical intensity than the hardnosed conceptual rebellion favoured by de Kooning.

In many of the pieces in Camargue (an exhibition at the Gormleys Fine Art gallery on the Lisburn Road) such as Study for Four Horses or Racing on the Beach, the outlines of people or horses are left intact and representationally accurate. Elsewhere expressionism takes over and forms are hinted at amid the surface blur, biomorphic and gestural. You just catch the suggestion of a horse or a horizon as the abstract use of colour, nervy brushstrokes and impasto fill the frame.

Hot pink, violet, sunflower yellow and chartreuse give these paintings a summer-time vibrancy and Mediterranean mood that lifts you, so fleetingly, out of drab old Belfast in late November. The swirling spontaneity of the paint suggests action, high-energy, wild horses galloping across the shore and the ceaseless movement of the sea.

White, Orange Camargue is landscape pared down to the intersection of colour and line. It is impossible to identify the scene or a figure, but the paint itself, its colour and manner of application, becomes suggestive of mood. The painting has movement in its lineaments and heat in its palette of burnt embers and luminous, sunset hues.

White, Green Camargue is a richer piece. Fern green and gentler gradations of colour produce a softer feeling, more pastoral and calming than the garish boldness of Yellow Horse by the Straits of Florida, one of the largest paintings in the collection. The silhouette of the grazing horse is just discernible. More important is the living, almost frantic emotion of the brushstrokes, thick swathes of colour together giving an impression of the general scene, photo-real definition abandoned in favour of colourful vagueness and whimsical ambiguity. Emotional experience is prioritized over the faithful depiction of physical reality.

The paintings can feel twee in places, especially where the palette overdoes the playschool colours and Irish equine theme. White Horse and Foal for example, reminds me of the painted scenes in Enya's music video for 'Orinoco Flow'.

Much stronger is Dancer with Yellow Hat and Horse, which almost has a surrealist quality in its mesh of melting, running colours and dripping, dancing lines, like a multi-colour flash of a carnival scene blurred by rain. There is poetry in this abstraction, feeling and intensity in the textured surface. Gypsy Dancers Say Goodbye is similarly evocative and its gritty, uneven paint suggests a kind of pathos or abandon.

The studies After Da Vinci's Neptune are interesting for the way they take a cross section of the original and update them with bolder colour. Da Vinci's furious swirls are captured in a flambuoyant palette, so too is the sense of equine power.

You might wonder what the Irish painterly fixation with horses is all about. Horses have a nobility, beauty and elegance that make them popular subjects. They are aesthetically pleasing and heavy with symbolism. In Irish mythology horses were associated with mystery, magic and potency. They embody desire, life force and ineradicable drive. Ronan Walsh preserves a certain wildness in his horses, a sense of anarchy, playfulness and passion. The dry conservatism of traditional representation gives way to free lines, free movement and momentum, like so many horses galloping in the wind.

Submitted by JJ Hughes

Source:
Visual Arts Review: Camargue: Joanne Savage appreciates the poetry in Ronan Walsh's equine paintings, 11/30/2009

http://www.culturenorthernireland.org/article/2943/visual-arts-review-camargue

Ronan Walsh was an Irish born Canadian, 1958, son of artist Eoin Walsh.  He died in 2002. Ronan graduated from NCAD Ireland in 1984, having skipped two years because of well regarded exhibitions.

Walsh cites tutoring by Sean Scully and his father Eoin Walsh as being as value.

From 1985 to 1988 Walsh was closely involved  with Temple Bar Studios and Gallery Project Arts in Dublin, both as studio and exhibiting artist. In 1987 he was elected Chairman of Independent Artists, which was founded by his father in 1959 as an alternative to the more conservative Royal Hibernian Academy exhibition in Ireland

While living in France and London, 1988-1990, Walsh became affiliated with the Trans Avant Garde or New Expressionism movement.

He exhibited with "Le Noveau Crie Artists Association" at Le Centre Culturel et Aerospatiale Toulouse (1986) and Belgium.

In 1988 he was chosen to represent Ireland at Art Junction, Nice, France.

Much of  Ronan Walsh's work from this period could broadly be described as being figurative expressionist and fauvist with a distinct emphasis on location, usually urban waterfronts, cityscapes and underground train stations. His work occasionally included figures that appear almost overwhelmed by their surroundings. The paintings from this period also incorporate found materials such as wood, tools, mixing sand, sawdust, pigment with paint.  Similarties between Walsh, Goya, and Aurbach are noted.
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In 1990 Walsh emigrated to Canada  and taught art for several years there. The paintings from 1990-2007 use more impasto, brighter colours, appear to be narrative and are painted alla prima, bravara and are related to Francis Bacon, Jack Yeats, Emile Nolde and Mario Marini. This work is narrative in which subjects are varied from figures, often multi-racial to dancers and horses either in forest landscapes or by the sea.

From 2007 to the present Walsh's work gradually evolved from figurative expressionism to abstract expressionism-using horses and the Camargue region in France thematically both as a bridge and source. These paintings are mostly drip painted with wide flowing washes broken by darting frantic lines, and suggested parallels with Willem  De Kooning and Joan Mitchell have been raised by critics.

Awards
1986 Travel Grant, Arts Council of Ireland
1985 Materials Award, Arts Council of Ireland
1984 Catalogue Grant, Arts Council/ref Joan Fowler

Submitted by JJ Hughes