Ever backwards
Laura Gascoigne
Breon OrCasey at 75 Berkeley Square Gallery until 17 May
tell you what influences my art.
LEvery bloody thing that happens to me and that I see from the time I wake up till the time I go to sleep. From whether the newsagent talks to me when I go in for my daily paper or not, to whether it is raining . . ' Breon O'Casey quotes Frank Auerbach's angry response to an interviewer in the foreword to A Celtic Artist: Breon O'Casey, the new book published to celebrate his 75th birthday. O'Casey himself might have made the point more gently, but its implication would have been the same: that when an artist passes three score years and ten, if his art isn't about everything, it won't be about much.
O'Casey is a Celtic artist by nature, not nurture. The son of playwright Sean O'Casey, he has lived in England all his life, though mostly on the Celtic fringes of the West Country and latterly near its westernmost tip. His house outside Penzance has many studios — for painting, printing, sculpting and weaving — as befits a man of many arts and crafts. In the lean years of the 1960s and 1970s in St Ives, he earned his living as a jeweller, hut for his 70th birthday gave himself a present of 'No More Jewellery'. His present birthday show at Berkeley Square Gallery is devoted to painting and sculpture.
Though bigger than in his last show at Scolar Fine Art, O'Casey's paintings — at less than a metre in any direction — are tiddlers by the usual abstract standards. They're equally modest in scope. Though surrounded by the open spaces of the Penwith Peninsula which have inspired generations of St Ives artists, O'Casey shuts himself in his studio to paint. Tithe landscape enters his work, it's in the detail: 'not the wood, not the tree, but the leaf; not the distant view, but the hedge; not the mountain, but the stone'. As a devotee of the god of small things, O'Casey defines himself by still life, rather than landscape, as 'an abstract painter . . who sees the world through a collection of pots and pans, apples and oranges (or circles, triangles and squares) rather than fields, trees and skies. Superficially he might seem to share an abstract vernacular with other St Ives painters such as Terry: Frost, but O'Casey's visual language has more ancient roots in the pre-figurative patterning of primitive art. Where Frost's paintings have exuberance, O'Casey's have mystery. His patient painterly marshalling of elements into uneven, off-square checkerboards of colour or triplets of shapes in rhythmic rows of three — 'the shorthand for infinity. . . the shortest row you can have' — has a talismanic quality about it. A wall of his paintings is like a deck of magic cards from which, if you knew how, you could read the runes.
On a scale of abstraction from expressionist to minimal, O'Casey occupies a middle point one might call ruminative: he's a painter who lets things happen, but is prepared to wait. His layering of pictures from softly brushed acrylic and collage allows him to feel his way towards a conclusion, shuffling shapes and colours until they settle into place. Acrylic's glazing properties also give full play to his musical command of colour harmonies in which solo notes of emerald, red or yellow raise clear, high voices over a deep chorus of earths. We tend to think of this medium as electric, but in O'Casey's Celtic hands it is unplugged.
A few of the paintings have figurative motifs, which have crossed over from the sculptures he began making in the 1990s. The animal bronzes here — birds, fish, a deer — are archetypal in form but finely finished, their fretted surfaces subtly patinated with colour. O'Casey's art moves forward by looking back beyond modernism to the simplicity of Lascaux. 'Ever backwards' is his guiding principle. 'If I am cutting edge, it is with a very blunt knife.'
A Celtic Artist: Breon O'Casey by Jack O'Sullivan is published by Lund Humphries, priced L30.
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