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 tree-tops; 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