Felim Egan: Only Connect by Andrew Lambirth Felim Egan’s paintings are all about relationships. We speak of spatial relationships, colour relationships, linear relationships (also lineal, but that’s another matter). In these paintings - large and small alike - forms abut, hover in close contiguity, or communicate over apparently vast distances. They complement, echo and extend each other, on a planar level and through space. They act metaphorically as well, appearing like stars in a night sky or intimations of landfall glimpsed from far off at sea. In these new paintings, tiny elements and accents have taken on greater character and importance. Paradoxically it’s as if we were further away, but nearer at the same time: we are required to pay particular attention to detail, but also to context. Synaesthesia, a psychological term, can be defined as ‘the production of a mental sense-impression relating to one sense by the stimulation of another sense’ (Concise OED). In other words, it’s like hearing music when looking at a painting. The cross-over and pollination of one art by another is one of the richest areas for speculative interpretation that we have. These new paintings by Felim Egan are closely connected to music, are to some extent inspired by it, and bring to light (stress the light) a new relation between the arts. When he’s working, Egan listens to music, which might be by Talking Heads, but just recently has been more likely to be Bach. In particular, Keith Jarrett’s interpretation of The Well-Tempered Clavier, as performed in this instance on piano. The parallels between the two arts are endless. In music the melodic is horizontal, the harmonic is vertical. Composers seek for an equilibrium between them, as Egan the painter seeks for balance between the vertical and horizontal elements in his paintings. All of Egan’s work can be said to be variations on a theme - a formal approach which of course originated in music. Then the character of a particular key is also here highly relevant. ‘C major’ is for instance traditionally a ‘white’ key, often associated with light and with the Enlightenment. ‘A minor’ tends to be a darker, complementary key. It is with related notions - with a common aspiration, perhaps - that Egan disposes his painterly structures and sets off his colours. Intervals in Blue and Preludes for A.B.G. is the collective title Egan has given this exhibition. Here is an oblique reference to Elgar’s Enigma Variations, each of which is addressed to one or more set of cryptic initials, although the identities of the composer’s friends thus described in the music have not proved difficult to de-code. However, there is also apparently a theme other than the one heard at the beginning of the piece, which Elgar said ‘goes through and over the whole set, but is not played’. This truly enigmatic half-presence might be said to be the very nature of identity and difference. In a similar way, Egan’s paintings deal with specificity, with what distinguishes one variation from another. All cats look grey in the dark, but we are here concerned with shades of grey, with shades of inflected emotion and meaning. Egan works on his canvases from every side, laying them flat on a broad table top and moving around them. In order to be able to put each aside from time to time to dry, he works on up to ten pictures at once. The ritual of moving around the canvas - the nervy pacing and considering, the sudden flurry (and risk) of activity - is fundamental to Egan’s approach. In what is a dance but also a duel, there resides a passionate discovery of self and meaning (via relationships to the surrounding world) which transcends the actual process, while at the same time being totally reliant upon it. These images are about paint but also about landscape; about the exact placing of pictorial elements; yet ultimately about the locating of self within the wider context of the world. There are hints of anguish and suffering in the darker paintings, but recollected in some sort of tranquillity, and harmonized over time as well as in the actual process of making the image. Nonetheless, despite the transformation of raw emotion into painting, the formal balancing of an image, there remains a gravity to these new paintings which sets them apart from previous achievements. They are of greater weight and strength of purpose. Each painting is a journey completed, an action consummated, a set of memories and perceptions brought into accord. Like an incantation – ‘from swerve of shore to bend of bay’ - the new work operates not just on straight lines and angles as before, but on the skimming of an arc, the brief but poignant meeting of a crescent and a quadrant. There is no straight bone in the human body, we were built for curves. As Picabia pointed out ‘our heads are round so that thoughts can change direction’. When we speak of a person being ‘rounded’ we mean more balanced and complete (if not more complex). In a very real sense, these new paintings of Egan’s are more fully developed than anything he has done. They are tougher, yet also more subtle. The paintings are built up in layers of paint mixed with stone dust. Egan tends to work from dark to light, perhaps laying down a black on the primed canvas (the larger paintings are made on cotton, the smaller on linen, each surface offering different properties of absorbancy and tension), only to cover it later with a lighter blue in different densities. Both these colours will come through in the tone of the finished painting, adding qualities of dark and light not easy to define. Texture is of the greatest importance, as evidence of previous strata (the archaeology or history of the painting, as it were) which may be excavated if Egan sands the surface back in order to adjust and re-paint, and as a means of emphasizing the surface presence of the painting. In some cases quite pronounced ridges of paint assert the physicality of the surface. The sweeps of paint which articulate the picture-space can look combed, textured as they are with the broadest gestures of the brush. At the most basic level, these images consist of edges of darkness, modulated expanses, and light notes. But of course there is much more to them. Even when utterly seduced by the gentian blue smoking darkness of a painting, the spectator is supposed to identify what is in fact connected to what, in Egan’s imaginary constellations, to decide how the sub-groups and clusters link up to prove the fundamental interconnectedness of all things. Essentially this is landscape painting - but is it? There is an inescapably urban sophistication to the placing of the elements that comprise an Egan painting. Yet there is wildness and passion too. Nature and culture. If it were all merely controlled arrangement, these paintings would have none of the visual compulsion they exert, they would not have their febrile edge. The final element to be applied to the canvas are the drawn chalk lines which in previous paintings have seemed closely to echo the horizontal edges of the canvas, though inclining slightly from them. In these new paintings, Egan shifts the lines even more from the horizontal, introducing a greater dynamic, and further activating the surface and space of the painting. It is a deliberate disturbance, seeking to involve the viewer more intensely in the drama of the painting. (Interestingly, there are no drawn chalk lines in the watercolours - there never have been - nor in the box paintings. Presumably they are only necessary when working on a larger scale, to orient and direct the eye.) The ‘low horizon’ which is suggested by these drawn chalk lines is eloquent but understated testimony to the fact that Egan has lived for the last fifteen years at Sandymount, where the rim of Dublin Bay opens out to the Irish Sea. Here on the strand, he walks his dogs over the pungent sands, ribbed and raked by the departing tide. His experience of the natural world informs his painting, without in any way directing it. At Sandymount he is on the edge of the city, staring out. It is a very particular perspective, apt for the philosopher, metaphysician or artist, and one which Egan has fruitfully adopted. Too many of us focus inwards, unable - without a spiritual belief - to take the larger view. Egan takes his cue from the broadness of the prospect. In these paintings he does indeed propose a larger view: he offers us not only windows and skylights, but sometimes even a hatch to the cellar. The warmth coming through these pictures is not just of colour, but derives from generosity and breadth of emotion. To accompany the 6 large ‘Interval’ paintings, Egan has painted a series of 12 wooden boxes, each measuring 24 cms square and 12 deep, which he refers to as ‘Preludes’. (He thinks of the smaller watercolours as associated studies.) The numbers are important, as symbol rather than system, reflecting the structure of The Well-Tempered Clavier. (It was published in two volumes, in 1722 and 1742, each containing 24 preludes and fugues, or one in every possible key.) In these box paintings, the squares and oblongs - the pictorial incidents - tend to go over the edges and around the corners, for Egan is moving deliberately into three dimensions. Usually the paint continues more or less uniformly along the sides of the box, though it can darken a shade, depending on how many layers have been applied and adjusted. Looking at the work in progress, as I was privileged to do, your eye is drawn to indented passages, where the surface has been sanded back through the accumulated layers, often to the woodgrain itself. These sites are the location of the colour patches which create the character of the picture, which may later be filled with more paint or perhaps with wax to bring an accent of that dreamy translucency to the surface that Egan so relishes. The soft blurred colours of the boxes - dark grey, dark blue, off-white, turquoise, tawny-grey - do not conflict with the enhanced objecthood of the box paintings, but confirm the spatial complexity of the picture plane, by suggesting deep space. One of the chief features of this body of work is the emphatic presence of vertical or horizontal banded elements. These stacks or chains of colour blocks seem to propose an identity which may refer directly to the natural world - which may even be considered cautiously descriptive. (For instance by way of reference point, very visible on the other side of the bay from Egan’s home are the two tall chimneys of a power station, coloured red, white and brown.) This colour banding towards the edge of a painting is like the contents page of a book - it suggests in brief the motifs and meanings of the picture. In these new paintings, particularly in the six magnificent large-format works, the focal points have been drawn out and deepened. Egan has succeeded in freeing up his vocabulary of form, and the activity of the picture surface has increased. The juncture of tentative curved lines, like seedpods hooked and burred for a long journey, or the apparent perforation of the picture plane to let in beautiful but disturbing astral light - these new disparate foci enrich the paintings with greater possibilities. The effect is like puffs of smoke moving through the sky or drops of colour falling through another liquid. You might detect more mundane references to fenceposts or TV aerials, yet there is often a cosmic edge to the imagery, or a landscape undertow - a suggestion of pools of brackish water in a drying delta, or a scattering of shooting stars in an ebon sky. What is new in all this is the increased sense of movement in Egan’s paintings, a renewed sense of dispersal. The placing of the squares of colour is no less precise and expertly managed than before (Egan experiments with watercolour on the canvas before fixing the exact hue in acrylic), but the edges of these patches are perhaps less precisely drawn, allowing them as it were to ‘bleed’ more into the main body of the painting. The relationship between the parts is thus made closer and more involved. There is a softness, a new hesitancy and fluency to the mark-making which complicates the meaning of these paintings. When Egan says ‘I don’t want them to be tricky’, he means that he avoids clever pictorial games in resolving them - not that he is afraid of their complexities. Here are subtleties and nuances we have not encountered before in Egan’s work, a depth and range of emotion given expression through painted imagery. These paintings are epiphanic, in that they convey to us the essential nature or meaning of something of which we were previously unaware. Something new is blowing through our skies. Register it, before it moves on. Finally, of course, our response has to be visual. As Shakespeare put it so economically in The Tempest: ‘No tongue: all eyes: be silent’. Quite. ©Andrew Lambirth, London and Bath, October 2002