Catalogue Foreword © Jeremy Hill / Cherry Lane Fine Arts 2008
In the world of the epigram ‘the road to riches is paved with good intentions,’ but today’s materialism pays scant regard to such sentiment. For the artist, his road is riddled with potholes and bedevilled with cross-roads and diversions. It is one thing to have ambition, another to plan and execute the strategy to achieve it. An artist has bills to pay, and so must sell paintings. But what if you believe in your work and don’t pander to fashion?
Underlying all David Begley’s work is a social sensitivity and conscience that holds him fast, so there is never any crowd pleasing, never any pastiche. He has a concept of expression that questions and debates. Though the intellectual depth to his work might slow his progress up the ladder of achievement, at the same time it adds weight and meaning to his concept of the picture as art. This is a rare enough honesty. But his continuing study of the great European master painters of Italy and Spain have given him an insight which he is able to manifest in contemporary terms. His work is utterly up-to-date in terms of technique, palette, and compositional structure; and this last is a real forte. Ambiguity and mystery pervade his canvas; beings hover in a heightened, if subdued, emotional state seemingly searching a reassurance of their relevance from the solidity and mass of the solid elements of his composition. His use of water, often a difficult subject to deal with convincingly, demonstrates the sheer skill of his technique.
Cleverly, David’s work is not wholly surrealist, not wholly realist. It’s not landscape painting, it’s not portraiture. His world is unworldly yet not unreal. If David were a poet he would not be writing simple rhyming couplets, he would be developing the complexity of Gerard Manly Hopkins’ sprung verse. One painting in this show, Foreground, epitomises David’s distinction; a red floor supports a gazing figure who seems oblivious to a wall of water held back only by the force that held the Red Sea open for Moses. Our gazing figure looks into the deep recess of space along the top of the water to a distant horizon, a depth of perspective which is a Begley trademark.
David had his first exhibition in 1996, and has produced a body of work each year since then, showing largely in Dublin and County Wexford, but also in Wales; he has had work hung at the Royal Hibernian Academy, and has completed a commision for a large scale piece for a church in Bunclody. He has also been the recipient of a Literature Bursary from Wexford County Council in 2000, so the poetry analogy is quite apt.
David Begley is a painter of whom Irish art can be proud to have in its midst; his paintings will reward and stimulate the viewer over a long period of time.
© Jeremy Hill 2008 |
