A Place at the Edge by Marina Vaizey 'Exactitude is not truth' - Matisse Felim Egan is a painter. In the context of late 20th century art that is almost a radical act, and certainly a profound commitment. Painting is his daily life, his obsession, his occupation, his vocation, his avocation, his calling. For several years he has lived by the sea, in Sandymount, Dublin. He walks, always accompanied by his two large affectionate and lively rust and cream coloured dogs. The dogs wander, adding through their canine curiosity further visual events to the daily meanderings. His sensibility is informed by the most acute attention to the movements of weather - sky, cloud, temperature, and time, time as light in the dawn, sunrise, sunset, twilight - the moistness in the air, the dry heat of the sun. He listens to a great deal of music: Irish folk music, Irish singing, European classics. He plays the Irish flute. The rhythms of the day and the rhythms of music continually underlie his visual alertness, acuity and composition. The paintings are built up very slowly, and perhaps as many as three or four will be worked at any one time. They are slowly brought to their own individual resolution. It is of crucial importance not only to know how to begin, but how to stop. The process is painstaking. The results look inevitable, natural, almost as though they were found objects. Layers and layers of very thin colour are applied to the surface of stretched canvas, or stretched linen. Whatever cloth is chosen gives subtly different effects. The materials - the mixed media of classic 20th century art - include a technically new medium, such as acrylic, as well as old, traditional techniques, wax, and encaustic. Stone powder is also mixed in. The stone gives a striking but restrained impasto, as ruffled and rippled as the sand left by the tide on the vast beach in front of Felim Egan's house. Yet he paints from memory: his studio is at the back of the small paved garden, enclosed, the windows giving out to the sky and not the sea. Emerging from this multi-layered coloured surface are classic, intuitive free-hand geometries, the character. These characters - square, rectangle, triangle, rod, line, stick, circle, curve - have in very different ways become the actors in idioms of abstraction which differ widely and wildly in appearance. These geometries, in diverse hands, have been strikingly integral, important and influential parts of the history of 20th century visual invention as it took its varied painted forms. The inventors or innovators of the non-objective world - so magnificently represented in the Stedelijk and several other major European and American public collections - deployed an exuberant and imaginative series of geometric forms. Some of these crowds of forms evoke, perhaps surprisingly, the calm geometries of Islamic decoration and architecture. There is a long history of abstraction, every form of human thought is an abstraction by definition, even of course that art that purports to be 'representational'. But one way of thinking about Malevich's phrase, 'the non-objective world', is to think of it as the abstraction from the mind's invention looking inwards. This is a further abstraction, imaginative uses of mathematical forms, themselves symbols: an inventory of forms that are not so easily found in observable nature with the naked eye. Amazingly, in recent years there have been more and more investigations into natural geometries: the spirals of shells, the forms of crystals. What seems to have been the invention of the artist is echoed in natural form, a neat reversal of the traditional human attempt to make visual sense of the observable world. It is as though the search for the spiritual, the world beyond, which once took the form of attempting to indicate observed nature now has gone on to an art that has been officially termed abstract, an art that in its interest in the articulation of space is closely allied to the highest achievements of architecture. It is worth reminding ourselves that one of the seminal texts, was Kandinsky's Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911/12) translated into English almost immediately (1914) by the artist Edward Wadsworth. Kandinsky argued that the 'pure' artist searched for the appropirate expressions only for 'inner and essential feelings'. Several decades ago at Charlottenburg in what was then West Berlin a deeply satisfying exhibition examined the meaning of spiritual art not only of Kandinsky's oeuvre, but also Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. On Americašs West Coast an enormous and controversial anthology of 20th century art was displayed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1986. The exhibition was called The Spiritual in Art Abstract Painting 1890 - 1985. Many of the innovators of 'modernism' were inspired very consciously by a notion of the spiritual, by a kind of spiritual spark, an internalised fireworks, a spangling of imagined form that erupted into new visual vocabularies. Spiritual in these terms is not to be considered in any way as synonymous with formal religious ritual and practice. It is this aspect of modernism that Felim Egan is transforming with his own highly individual notion of place, the genius loci, recalling the slow growth from topography into landscape that transformed art several centuries ago. His are not domestic pictures, however domestic in size some may be, and however at home they often are. Rather they are windows looking inward in order to look outward. Moreover, however profound Felim Egan's paintings are, they are also joyful. Several groups of paintings have been installed in public places in Dublin. Two floors of a restaurant in Dublin - one of the most prominent in the city, minimalist in decor and opulent in food and drink - have special groups, including curved paintings on a curved wall. In the newly restored, renovated and expanded National Gallery of Ireland, a quartet of large Felim Egan paintings is the only art by a living artist included in the building. They inhabit a two storey high public space, a space for a moment to meditate. They are coloured spaces, abstract landscapes in which to pause. Felim Eganšs characters: circles, rods, sticks, rectangles, often with slightly blurred outlines, and with delicately glinting surfaces, like lustre, act on the surface of his paintings in varying, related ways. These gently shining forms appear translucent, almost as though we were looking through the surface at something perhaps far out to sea or sky. At times they seem to float, as though buoyed up. At other times they have genuinely emerged, and of course they are the result of careful, painstaking, delicate scrapings - down through the levels and layers of the colours. These in turn, applied to the surface over-all to provide the ground, the base for further visual activity. The artist is not concerned with symmetry, or with a frenzy of activity, and his 'actors' do not take centre stage; but they are crucial. For they are the anchors of the floods of ruffled colour, a surface just lifted as though the wind were sweeping over water, or grasses in a field. They sweep the eye across the surface, at oblique angles, north and south. In a diptych and a triptych, the edge between adjacent surfaces is part of the composition. And in most of the paintings there is the tenderest line, an angle like a horizon, sometimes almost straight, sometimes a little tip-tilted. This nearly invisible line also serves to elucidate space, to help us to spatial definition. Felim Egan's latest paintings explore a phenomenon common to us all, here made beautifully explicit, explicitly beautiful. We all know the pattern of thought by which we apply adjectives which bear a strong emotional load to natural phenomena, or abstract concepts. We talk about the benign sun, the smiling moon, the serene hills, the fierce ocean waves, the savage storm. Our descriptions in written and spoken language graft human emotion onto what are apparently neutral and indifferent activities and concepts. We cannot help it, it is how we grasp our world and explain it to ourselves. It is an emotional investment we cannot avoid, consciously or unconsciously. It affects intellectual activity. There is the inexplicable notion of rightness, applied to art, to investigation, to experiment. When the structure of DNA - the double helix - was discovered, the scientists referred to the beauty of the solution. Here creativity was a form of scientific illumination. The discovery was an intuitive leap of the imagination, inescapably crucial for the result, however equally necessary is the sequence of arduous investment in time and effort, study and work, that prepares the ground for that moment of transcendent insight. In yet another version of the equation of beauty and inevitability, of truth, the French mediaeval historian, Etienne Gilson, introduced his edition of the controversial letters of Heloise and Abelard - at times thought to have been invented, even fradulent - as too beautiful not to be true. Felim Egan has found that in different languages the sequence of the point of the compass is often expressed in a different order. In English, we tend to say north, south, east, west. Four major paintings - and one, two, three, or four much smaller paintings, like satellites, or planets round the sun, as though gradations on the imaginary compass - are indeed entitled north, south, east, and west. The artist has translated and metamorphosed many of the associations we have - from the perspective of northern Europe - of the emotional connotations of physical geography - and of the web of relationships of a personal kind. The landscapes of the mind of the far north may sketch out in terms of northern light, the protestant ethic, cool, cold, clear, lucid, grey, silvery. Colours are variants of white, green, greys. The North has a political dimension for the artist, too. He was brought up in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, and left only as a young student, after one year in art college in the North. The South, for northerners, is hot, warm, pink, red, black, highly overly emotional. The East has connotations of the spiritual, the mystic, the sense of the far east as potent as the far north, it is pale and pearly. The East is equally a desert. The West is pioneering, for the Irish especially poignant, a notion and a distance of escape, of opportunity, beyond the pale, over the storm tossed seas, from the grey Old World to the bright blue New World. And the Far West melds of course eventually with the Far East. These are emotional truths, hovering like the geometric forms of Felim Egan's invention on the edges of consciousness while the painstaking process of constructing the paintings carries on. Each direction, each compass note, forms a room of paintings. Landscape itself is both inspiration and catalyst. Titles evoke: three big recent paintings remind us again how crucial it is for Felim Egan to live on the edge of things, on the edge of the sea. It has always been significant for the painters of the two islands of Ireland and Great Britain to live under the ever-changing skies and always so near the sea. The deepest inland is never more than half a day away in time. Strand, suggests the ways in which the sands reflect the pinkish light of the rising sun; Morning Tide, is a silvery painting in the artist's own phrase 'washed by the grey of a winter's rising sun', and Foreland is aglow from the sun setting on Donegal's Bloody Foreland. In both large and small surfaces, in large paintings on canvas and linen, and smaller paintings on board, and in watercolours on the most seductively rich luminous white paper, the formal characters dance in coloured spaces, to a tune and composition of the artist's invention. Klee's famous phrase resonates: taking a line for a walk. One of Britainšs best loved mystical poets, Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote of the divine glory of dappled things: in these paintings, full of repose, but never still, movement - the changing moments of reflection on water, stone, sand, - is suggested by almost endless infinitesimal dapplings of colour. The vocabulary is apparently simple, yet the potentially endless series of modulations, as from key to key in musical notation, from rhyme to rhyme, or rhythm to rhythm in poetic notation, is masterfully, seductively suggested in a sequence of a hundred watercolours. Each is a note on its own, a visual word on its own, each may also look to another to form a phrase. It is the suggestion of endless linking one composition to another that stands as an analogue for the varied repetitions, the cycles of day into night as the world turns. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis, those formalities of sonata, or sonnet, proposition and resolution, are cadences, tempi, pulses evoked by Felim Egan's paintings. There is a man standing on a beach, looking at the world. © Marina Vaizey, Spring 1999