Seamus Heaney Reviews Felim Egan
Sandymount Strand 1996
According to the English poet, Donald Davie, "excellence is sparse."
The proposition is arguable - Hopkins would surely say that
excellence is packed - but it does represent something perceptibly
true, a constant mood or principle of the classical temper.
Still, the point of a sparse excellence is not to celebrate empty
spaces as such. On the contrary, Davie was probably thinking of the
way that strictly dispersed elements can induce a sharpened sense
of what is burgeoning behind them and seeking admission amongst
them. Art of this kind has both the precision and the suggestiveness
of the sundial: depending upon the way you regard it, it can show you
something exact in the here and now or allow you to meditate on
where and what you are in the solar system.
Felim Egan's work has the fine-drawn strength of this sundial art. Its
umber is as likely to be a shadowline marking time as a brushful of
earth-toned paint laid down on the canvas. Yet such near-abstraction
is Egan's way of manifesting the exquisite ache which the physical
world induces.
His finesse, in other words, does not preclude pressure or warmth. If
mercury in a thermometer or a barometer can take the measure of
prevailing conditions, so Egan's art can be seen to posess a
corresponding adequacy. It is refined, but its refinement is equal to
the world it registers. Felim Egan's work wears well. There is an
intelligence about it that gives it staying power as well as immediate
sureness of touch. I have had pictures of his on my walls for years
now and they continue to live with a special alertness of their own.
They are quiet and await your pleasure. They call you out, they call
you in. They are fuller than you had realised.
© Seamus Heaney, Oct.1992
Sandymount Strand 1996
According to the English poet, Donald Davie, "excellence is sparse."
The proposition is arguable - Hopkins would surely say that
excellence is packed - but it does represent something perceptibly
true, a constant mood or principle of the classical temper.
Still, the point of a sparse excellence is not to celebrate empty
spaces as such. On the contrary, Davie was probably thinking of the
way that strictly dispersed elements can induce a sharpened sense
of what is burgeoning behind them and seeking admission amongst
them. Art of this kind has both the precision and the suggestiveness
of the sundial: depending upon the way you regard it, it can show you
something exact in the here and now or allow you to meditate on
where and what you are in the solar system.
Felim Egan's work has the fine-drawn strength of this sundial art. Its
umber is as likely to be a shadowline marking time as a brushful of
earth-toned paint laid down on the canvas. Yet such near-abstraction
is Egan's way of manifesting the exquisite ache which the physical
world induces.
His finesse, in other words, does not preclude pressure or warmth. If
mercury in a thermometer or a barometer can take the measure of
prevailing conditions, so Egan's art can be seen to posess a
corresponding adequacy. It is refined, but its refinement is equal to
the world it registers. Felim Egan's work wears well. There is an
intelligence about it that gives it staying power as well as immediate
sureness of touch. I have had pictures of his on my walls for years
now and they continue to live with a special alertness of their own.
They are quiet and await your pleasure. They call you out, they call
you in. They are fuller than you had realised.
© Seamus Heaney, Oct.1992
