The artist's
regular visits to the Beara Peninsula revive his interest in
watercolour landscapes. He explains: 'Ever since I became a painter some
fifty years ago, excited by the very smell of oil paint, I've been equally
drawn to watercolour, Quite apart from these small landscapes, I have painted
very many more head images in watercolour than in oil. Watercolour has
taught me much in regard to painting in oil. It has helped me to release
myself ... both painter and viewer work which preoccupied are constricted
by the known appearance and identity of the human individual. Watercolour
somehow loosens the knot of identity, while landscape frees you of all
such constriction. I do not, myself, believe in artistic creation. In art
as in science, I believe in discovery. Discovery, you might say,
is revelation through accident, and no art form provides more opportunity
for accident than watercolour.' Yvonne Scott observes: 'The watercolour
landscapes have a particular place in his oeuvre. These are primarily
understood as personal rather than mainstream works. As he has explained:
"these were always made to one side of the more problematic me, so
that I have tended to think of them as a diversion, the exploration of
a private avenue". The landscape paintings are, nonetheless, very
significant. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, le Brocquy produced
a series of works addressing locations in various parts of the Country,
primarily Beara, Wicklow and Dublin. These are not the incidental painted
sketches of a transient visitor, but considered responses to places he
knows well, or whose experience has a special meaning for him ... The artist
is clear about his exploration of the topography of landscape which he
intensionally transforms from objective description to subjective response.
This process, he explains, is not so much "creation" as "discovery"
- the uncovering of the essence of a place, and its experience.' ...
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