According
to Anne Crookshank: 'Le Brocquy has
always been a great practitioner of watercolour and the thin washes of
his early oils have much in common with this method. But, in the last few
years, his watercolours have taken on a new value. The irregular dabs of
brilliant colour, purple, blue, and green, as non-descriptive as the tesserae
of a Byzantine mosaic, build up the form of his heads with a tense, nervous
immediacy which oil with its overlapping layers and opaque thickness never
can achieve. The traces of paper left between each stroke, which enhance
the brilliancy of the colors, and the gleam of whiteness, which glows through
the paint, all help to create the truly magical effect of images coagulating
in front of your eyes, coming alive, mediating, speaking, and ultimately
returning to their own imaginative genius. He sometimes uses tissue paper
to paint from, using it in such a way that the creases make caesuras in
the strokes of paint. The results are deliberately induced accidents which
help to keep the images at a distance from us, to give them reality only
as paintings, not as descriptive portraits ... The magic of the quietness
of le Brocquy's oils is surpassed only by the excitement of his watercolors.
They may be as still as the oils. But the sheer joy of their running, smudged,
fragmented, clear colors brings vital reality to the spirit of his rediscovered
genius. In this aspect of his work, le Brocquy has added a new dimension
to his art. He has become a great colorist.' ...
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