Wood Sculptures 1-2 m
Playthings for the Soul
The art of Felim Egan by Michael Longley
This world is not conclusion - Emily Dickinson
Felim Egan's paintings and sculptures come into being according to their own
laws of growth.He prefers to make his own stretchers, to feel for himself whether
the cotton or linen is too light or too loose: a sailor adjusting sails. In order to build
up a robust texture, he mixes his paint with ground stone and resin, then brushes
it violently until the acrylic dries. As he himself puts it, he "stretches a colour in all
directions." He does this flat on the floor, avoiding runs, keeping things under
control. The process is for him as precarious as watercolour. Layers of different
colours are applied in a way that allows each colour to insinuate itself and
contribute to a complicated glow. He paints around and away from areas where
he senses images may occur, though at this stage he thinks of these as
"negatives" only. If they are to play a positive role by providing the occasion for
colour, wax may be applied to bring them forward, just as sanding will make them
recede--like stained-glass windows taking in the sky, or doors that lead into a
shadowy room. Painting for Egan is all about surface, about keeping images "in
front" or "behind", about controlling the space.
It pleases him that for his sculptures he will make images out of the wax he
applies to his canvases; and that the bronzes which emerge from the "lost wax"
process in the foundry will be echoed in the bronze shapes he inserts into the
works painted on wooden panels. These cross-references seem crucial to an
artist who, rather than concentrate on one piece at a time, prefers to let a group
pf works interact and generate its own energies; who chooses at regular intervals
to visit the proposed gallery space and let the imagined emptiness provoke new
ideas. Of course, this particular exhibition consists of more than one space or
"emptiness". In each room and in the connecting corridor different aspects are
revealed: five bronzes accompany the ten large canvases; the watercolours are
shown on their own, as are the wooden panels. This gives us a wonderful sense
of the artist finding his way among his preoccupations, his passage within and
between works evidence of the practical and mysterious ways in which an oeuvre
accumulates.
The other presence which permeates this show is Sandymount Strand, its high
tides lapping the sea-wall just a few yards from Egan's house. Standing there you
feel as tall as the horizon and the oil-tanker at anchor in the middle-distance. You
can see for miles. As the tide goes out it shapes the sand which is then marked
by wormy scribbles and the prints of birds. That's how it will look until the next
high tide. Most days Egan goes with his dog on the same walk over a landscape
which never stays the same. He may stroll out a mile towards the horizon, and he
can find his way in the dark. This intertidal zone influences his rarified, humorous
vocabulary of circles, lines and triangles, his fleeting references, the gestures we
register somewhere between glimpse and after-image. He lets things happen,
then reduces detail, stripping his images down. Perhaps this is his way of facing
up to the immensity of nature on his own doorstep. He sets the minutiae of life in
an endless vista. He shows us "how full emptiness really is" (John Ashbery's
observation). Or, as the great American poet Emily Dickinson puts it:
'The Brain is wider than the Sky,
For, put them side by side,
The one the other will contain
With ease, and You beside.
The Brain is deeper than the Sea,
For, hold them, Blue to Blue,
The one the other will absorb,
As Sponges, Buckets do.
The Brain is just the weight of God,
For, lift them, Pound for Pound,
And they will differ, if they do,
As Syllable from Sound.'
Released from the prison of geometry, Egan's quirky shapes behave, as he
himself reports, like "wee characters". Though each picture or sculpture becomes
its own microcosm, other realities find room within. Choreography and
orchestration do not seem inappropriate metaphors for describing Egan's
procedures. Contrapuntal, harmonious, sonorous, these works have been born
out of the struggle between inventiveness on the one hand and a deliberately
restricted range of themes on the other. The rich tonalities depend on a frugality
of means.
In addition, it seems that the potent mysteries of megalithic drawing, Ogham
stone, hieroglyphic, pictogram have been invoked. Amid so much sophistication
we sense the primitive responses that drive riddle and spell. The urgencies of the
graffiti-scribbler joust with the elegance of the calligrapher's gestures. At an even
more literal level the boogying lines suggest germination, spring shoots, vegetal
stirrings, as well as musical notation; the triangles gull-prints perhaps, or treetops;
the circles sun and moon. In the sculptures which play with scale by
keeping mere handfuls of material well out of reach on tall pedestals, the circles
change into pebbles, stones, permanent snowballs, what you will. Bronze could
hardly be more light-hearted. Suspended between the earth and their
counterparts in the sky, these most characteristic creations are indeed "playthings
for the soul". This is a phrase from a poem of mine called "Stilts": it concludes
with a mythologised portrait of my father's father, a carpenter who:
'Comes from another town
With tools and material
To manufacture stilts
And playthings for the soul.'
Felim Egan has never been more true to the Japanese concept of karumi: not a
brush-stroke or syllable too many. His habitual understatement grows more
assured, his spare lyricism more eloquent. Purged of rhetoric, Beckettian almost,
earthy and yet etherial, his is a pianissimo world where whimsy swells into vision.
These new pieces are clearly the fruits of prolonged contemplation. But however
deliberate they may be, they excite us because Egan remains open to the
unexpected: precariously balanced between experience and intuition,
detachment and involvement, plan and passion. As he moves through his middle
years, he appears more generous with himself, more open. By now he is the
figure we can nearly make out in the landscape, and the atmosphere is charged.
He is unlikely to confront us face to face. Instead, it is his heroic task to show us,
in Emily Dickinson's extraordinary phrase, 'the Faces of the Atoms'.
© Michael Longley, Halloween 1995
The art of Felim Egan by Michael Longley
This world is not conclusion - Emily Dickinson
Felim Egan's paintings and sculptures come into being according to their own
laws of growth.He prefers to make his own stretchers, to feel for himself whether
the cotton or linen is too light or too loose: a sailor adjusting sails. In order to build
up a robust texture, he mixes his paint with ground stone and resin, then brushes
it violently until the acrylic dries. As he himself puts it, he "stretches a colour in all
directions." He does this flat on the floor, avoiding runs, keeping things under
control. The process is for him as precarious as watercolour. Layers of different
colours are applied in a way that allows each colour to insinuate itself and
contribute to a complicated glow. He paints around and away from areas where
he senses images may occur, though at this stage he thinks of these as
"negatives" only. If they are to play a positive role by providing the occasion for
colour, wax may be applied to bring them forward, just as sanding will make them
recede--like stained-glass windows taking in the sky, or doors that lead into a
shadowy room. Painting for Egan is all about surface, about keeping images "in
front" or "behind", about controlling the space.
It pleases him that for his sculptures he will make images out of the wax he
applies to his canvases; and that the bronzes which emerge from the "lost wax"
process in the foundry will be echoed in the bronze shapes he inserts into the
works painted on wooden panels. These cross-references seem crucial to an
artist who, rather than concentrate on one piece at a time, prefers to let a group
pf works interact and generate its own energies; who chooses at regular intervals
to visit the proposed gallery space and let the imagined emptiness provoke new
ideas. Of course, this particular exhibition consists of more than one space or
"emptiness". In each room and in the connecting corridor different aspects are
revealed: five bronzes accompany the ten large canvases; the watercolours are
shown on their own, as are the wooden panels. This gives us a wonderful sense
of the artist finding his way among his preoccupations, his passage within and
between works evidence of the practical and mysterious ways in which an oeuvre
accumulates.
The other presence which permeates this show is Sandymount Strand, its high
tides lapping the sea-wall just a few yards from Egan's house. Standing there you
feel as tall as the horizon and the oil-tanker at anchor in the middle-distance. You
can see for miles. As the tide goes out it shapes the sand which is then marked
by wormy scribbles and the prints of birds. That's how it will look until the next
high tide. Most days Egan goes with his dog on the same walk over a landscape
which never stays the same. He may stroll out a mile towards the horizon, and he
can find his way in the dark. This intertidal zone influences his rarified, humorous
vocabulary of circles, lines and triangles, his fleeting references, the gestures we
register somewhere between glimpse and after-image. He lets things happen,
then reduces detail, stripping his images down. Perhaps this is his way of facing
up to the immensity of nature on his own doorstep. He sets the minutiae of life in
an endless vista. He shows us "how full emptiness really is" (John Ashbery's
observation). Or, as the great American poet Emily Dickinson puts it:
'The Brain is wider than the Sky,
For, put them side by side,
The one the other will contain
With ease, and You beside.
The Brain is deeper than the Sea,
For, hold them, Blue to Blue,
The one the other will absorb,
As Sponges, Buckets do.
The Brain is just the weight of God,
For, lift them, Pound for Pound,
And they will differ, if they do,
As Syllable from Sound.'
Released from the prison of geometry, Egan's quirky shapes behave, as he
himself reports, like "wee characters". Though each picture or sculpture becomes
its own microcosm, other realities find room within. Choreography and
orchestration do not seem inappropriate metaphors for describing Egan's
procedures. Contrapuntal, harmonious, sonorous, these works have been born
out of the struggle between inventiveness on the one hand and a deliberately
restricted range of themes on the other. The rich tonalities depend on a frugality
of means.
In addition, it seems that the potent mysteries of megalithic drawing, Ogham
stone, hieroglyphic, pictogram have been invoked. Amid so much sophistication
we sense the primitive responses that drive riddle and spell. The urgencies of the
graffiti-scribbler joust with the elegance of the calligrapher's gestures. At an even
more literal level the boogying lines suggest germination, spring shoots, vegetal
stirrings, as well as musical notation; the triangles gull-prints perhaps, or treetops;
the circles sun and moon. In the sculptures which play with scale by
keeping mere handfuls of material well out of reach on tall pedestals, the circles
change into pebbles, stones, permanent snowballs, what you will. Bronze could
hardly be more light-hearted. Suspended between the earth and their
counterparts in the sky, these most characteristic creations are indeed "playthings
for the soul". This is a phrase from a poem of mine called "Stilts": it concludes
with a mythologised portrait of my father's father, a carpenter who:
'Comes from another town
With tools and material
To manufacture stilts
And playthings for the soul.'
Felim Egan has never been more true to the Japanese concept of karumi: not a
brush-stroke or syllable too many. His habitual understatement grows more
assured, his spare lyricism more eloquent. Purged of rhetoric, Beckettian almost,
earthy and yet etherial, his is a pianissimo world where whimsy swells into vision.
These new pieces are clearly the fruits of prolonged contemplation. But however
deliberate they may be, they excite us because Egan remains open to the
unexpected: precariously balanced between experience and intuition,
detachment and involvement, plan and passion. As he moves through his middle
years, he appears more generous with himself, more open. By now he is the
figure we can nearly make out in the landscape, and the atmosphere is charged.
He is unlikely to confront us face to face. Instead, it is his heroic task to show us,
in Emily Dickinson's extraordinary phrase, 'the Faces of the Atoms'.
© Michael Longley, Halloween 1995
