New Drawings by David Begley 2008 - 2009
A selection from the following fourteen drawings is currently exhibited at The Norman Gallery, Wexford in 'New Works by Robert Ryan and David Begley' from July 18 to august 16 2009.
Drawings by David Begley from several ongoing series are presented here. Two figurative works 'The Mirrror' and 'For the love of light' were informed by visits to Archaeological museums in Ireland, Germany and Spain. These are taken from 'small finds' [see also 'Wunderkammer: Indian Summer' and 'Hall of muses' [oils, 2008].
'Homecoming', 'When we begin again' and 'When we land' are part of an ongoing series which began in 2006 with the painting 'The Wanderer'. The motif of a figure surrounded by a vast 'landscape' first appeared in Begley's work in 'The Resurrection' [2002]. 'Momentum' and 'Flight patterns' are also part of this series but consider another spatial dimension to the spaces presented in 'Homecoming' etc. In 'When we land' and 'When we see clearly [forms appear]' these spaces / dimensions merge.
The central formal concern of the work continues to be space and light. The progression from dark to light and the presence of both. Begley's process can be described as an intuitive one - forms arrive from marks, scratches, grounds, rubbings and from these beginnings images are 'grown'. Images are found and lost, re-emerge and one often leads to another.
An elipitical form which began as an oil study of a skull made in august 2008 appears in many of these drawings. This motif evolved through paintings made before October 2008, at times an image of death and of life, a 'universal brain' ['When the lights go out' / 'What we took from the garden', oil 2008], an after-life, to finally become a simple motif of creation: an egg. Whilst in some images such as 'Homecoming' the elipse is presented as a mandorla of light carrying a narrative intention, in others it appears of itself - a shape, a device, a motif no longer having a meaning. It re-appears in the egg of the mirror, the forms landing and rising, and the rounded flints found by the lover of light.
Although these works are of the imagination, Begley has collected many references in the landscape surrounding his studio in Bunclody, Wexford. A notebook of these studies is available to view at The Norman Gallery. Also presented are two new works in oil 'Before the light goes out' and 'Even when the light goes out'.
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