Sometimes art can make you want to disappear, but not in a bad way. Sometimes, standing in front of a painting can remind you so overwhelmingly of the way in which we are all part of a bigger whole that it seems to offer the possibility of a kind of painless expiration, an embrace that might simply absorb you, not into obliteration, but into everything. It is rare, but sometimes art can remind you of your own insignificance without making you feel at all small. William McKeown’s art did that.
McKeown was born in Tyrone in 1962, but was living and working in Edinburgh when he died last October. He was surfing a mid-career peak marked by a superb solo show at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Imma) in 2008. An inevitably sombre tribute show at the Kerlin gallery celebrates his work with four cool, meditative paintings and a reconstruction of one of his “room” installations.
McKeown’s paintings were often, and perhaps mostly, about hope. His early works looked abstract but were, in fact, representational; they were paintings of patches of sky. Many had the word “hope” in the title, but they were never just cheerful paintings of light, they were always more complex than that. They could range in mood from the peach-to-blue dawn of 2006’s Hope Painting (The Light Inside) to the night-sky-with-buttercup-glow of the specifically dated Hope Painting (15.04.06), also completed that year.
He was inspired by childhood memory, and drew rural wildflowers in colouring pencil, which he exhibited alongside his paintings. Narrow Lane Primrose #2 (2005) is part of The Dayroom installation at Kerlin.
Apparently, he did not intend his subtly graded monochromes to be transcendental, but they were. What he wanted was to produce art that was generous, that was about open space, that offered clarity, both mental and emotional. If you met it on its own terms, it did just that.
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As he progressed, it became clear that he was not just painting how the light looked, but how it felt to witness the sunrise, how it felt to allow the light to push back the darkness, both visually and emotionally. In 2002, he showed Forever Paintings at the Kerlin: squares of subtly shifting blue pigment, like visions of infinity.
His work was never deliberately difficult or clever, or showy. Any comparison or allusion to colour-field painting, the history of abstraction, or art-world trends was entirely secondary — and quite possibly irrelevant — to the purity of the task at hand. He painted this way because it is how he answered the questions he had about life. Because he pursued the essence of something intangible, his paintings offered not just the gift of hope but the double-edged promise of escape.
His black Tomorrow paintings, with their pigment-soaked surfaces and canvases made from stitched linen squares, were completed in 2010 and shown at the Ormeau Baths Gallery that year and at Imma in the Twenty exhibition in 2011. The first painting in the Kerlin is also a stitched canvas. These works are as much about the difficulties of holding it together, metaphorically speaking, as they are about the gentle glory of hope-giving light.
The Tomorrow paintings let in only a chink of light at the bottom corners, and it was not painted light; it was the raw surface of his unbleached canvas. The works at the Kerlin are all brighter than these. The upward arc of the brushstrokes seems to urge viewers to stand tall, to look up, to breathe in, to go forward towards the light.
As yellow spreads into grey, or white into blue, the edges of these works are marked by rough black “frames” — painted lines that do not meet, like a reminder that bliss is only visible through a gap in reality. Although McKeown’s work hovered in this space between paradise and pain, it was never painful to encounter. It was always uplifting because of the light, whether it was a bare chink or an all-embracing blur.
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“I wanted to focus on a moment where surface dissolves,” he said in 1997. “Where the appearance of what is seen encounters the invisibility of what is sensed.” There were times when his paintings looked a lot like how heaven might feel.
McKeown’s wildflower drawings ground the work in something tangible — even though they are tied to the intangible past. Daisies, poppies, snowdrops: all small, unexpected beauties that remind us that life is good, because life goes on despite it all. Yet the light in his oeuvre was always tempered by knowledge of the dark.
Last year, his contribution to the Hugh Lane Gallery’s The Golden Bough series was a darkened room from which viewers could emerge into the bright daylight of the space beyond. He described it as “a Willie McKeown readymade”. His Dayroom at Kerlin may look like a waiting room, but it is a welcoming, yellow space: a door, a window, a painting, a drawing, a fluorescent light that hangs above. Eyes open in this room, as does the mind. The window and door offer potential exit routes that are really other frames for looking in. The most tempting escape route is not via the window or door, back into the real world, but further into McKeown’s vision of light, via the painting.
When he spoke about the space he was trying to paint, he said: “You can’t really do it — you can’t represent that space. It only happens in the head. You can only feel.” I think he was wrong. You can do it. He did it, and in such a way that we felt it, too.
William McKeown: A Room is at the Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, until April 14