The Paintings of Martina O’Brien Reconfigure the Irish Landscape from Scratch

Written by: Wilson Wong

We often tend to stereotype the culture of a country when a particular field of eminence happens to upstage all others. Ireland is a prime example: While Irish art is hardly as well known as Irish literature ––and particularly Irish poetry ––that verdant land has produced its own fair share of distinguished modern painters, including George Barret, Francis Danby, Frederick William Burton and Jack Yeats, the younger brother of the great poet William Butler Yeats. And among the contemporary Irish artists encountered recently, one of the most impressive, as well as one of the most quintessentially Irish in her subject matter, is Martina O’Brien, whose work can be seen at Agora Gallery, 530 West 25th Street, from June 2 through 23. (Reception: Thursday, June 4, from 6 to 8 PM.)

O’Brien, who studied at The National College of Art and Design, in Dublin, invariably starts with a very specific landscape, which she sketches in charcoal and colored pencils before moving on to her main medium of oil paints. Working with brush and palette knife, she begins with the actual lay of the land, but eventually develops the composition along abstract lines, even while remaining faithful to its essentials. Her compositions are lyrical expressions of the particular qualities of light in the locations that she chooses, atmospherically accurate and evocative. Yet running alongside their representational qualities are abstract attributes that bring her paintings alive in coloristic and tactile terms belonging to the art of painting alone.

Her colors, for example, are not taken directly from nature in any slavishly imitative manner. It is highly doubtful that the streaks of purple-violet and the strident aquamarine blue hues between the brown mounds of moist earth in O’Brien’s oil on canvas “Divided Seascape Sandymount” would have been present in the actual scene from which the artist worked. However, what they do seem to depict accurately is O’Brien’s emotional response to this particular shoreline close to Dublin’s coast. And therein lies its true verisimilitude; for like all artists who make a subject wholly their own, O’Brien puts the singular stamp of her style upon the place, transforming it in purely painterly terms.

Some of the tactile qualities in her paintings are created by adding substances such as bee’s wax, sand, acrylic and hemp to her oil pigments, into which she also scores ridges with her palette knife, creating painted terrains as rich and substantial as those in the compositions on a material presence that can make one think of furrowed fields.

ISkies are another major feature of O’Brien’s paintings, and here too, there is an intriguing interaction between the materiality of the pigment and the ethereal nature of what it depicts, particularly in her handling of vaporous cloud masses. In this regard, she seems to share a certain kinship with John Schueler, an American Abstract Expressionist who discovered his true artistic vocation in "skyscapes" painted off the Coast of Scotland.

Yet Martina O’Brien is finally a unique talent, generally taking four to six weeks on each painting, building its surface with oil and mixed media until it is not so much a representation of the Irish landscape as a similarly encrusted surrogate for its earthy firmament, magnificently recreated in her own inimitable manner.

Image Credits: Ocean Colours Oil on Canvas, 31.5" x 31.5"