‘The fact they even exist is optimistic’

Virginia artist STEPHEN DUNNE discusses his new exhibition, the urge to surprise himself, and the time Lou Reed tried to karate chop him.

Artists often make the most of gallery wall space by cramming in as many paintings as possible. Not so with Stephen Dunne. His exhibition in the Townhall Cavan gallery space features only five images. It’s striking, a sign of confidence in the strength of the images.

Four of the oil paintings are large in scale - essentially measuring Stephen’s reach when painting, while a fifth is much smaller in scale and more like a palate cleanser.

I recall being told by Michelle Boyle that it’s been calculated that people in galleries look at paintings for on average eight seconds.

“So what do I get? Forty seconds - almost a minute!”

He does admit that by showing less he wants to encourage “a deeper looking”.

“If I was really brave I would just put in one,” he says considering that the first image you see arguably “does everything that the other ones do”.

That first painting features a number of yellow birds - presumably canaries - perched on branches with their backs facing the viewer. Another two have similar birds perched on trees or briars, but in lesser numbers, and with the sky cast in different hues. In a fourth painting the birds are replaced by quirky looking fruit bats and the final painting is much smaller, featuring simply a branch.

Upon closer examination you begin to wonder about the foliage. Some of it is detailed with highlights, elsewhere it’s dashed off and blurred like a camera lens has moved while taking a photo.

“Everything shifts,” says Stephen, whose 15 years in London have dented his Dublin accent. “Everything is a quicksand of signifying, so a leaf is a blob is a leaf. A bird is a banana,” he says pointing to a banana hanging that I had failed to notice, because it is executed in the exact tones as the canaries, but now it’s the only thing I can see when looking at the painting.

“A lot of what they are about is perception and looking - so the birds are often looking somewhere or not looking.”

Stephen says birds plural but really on this particular painting he sees it as the same bird captured at different times, still looking.

“Their landscape is shifting around them. It’s hard to put movement into a static thing like a rectangle of paint - so there’s a kind of movement.

“But that movement has as much to do with painterly abstraction as it is picturing. There’s a constant fight between picturing, making a painting, the history of art and a kind of mapping of my own activity with the brush.”

A graduate of the MA program in painting at London’s Royal College of Art and of NCAD in Dublin, he is a deep thinker in the process of making art and he admits he’s “quite invested in notions of abstraction and figuration”.

Concluding that both abstraction and figuration are “exhausted”, he explores ways of flitting between the two. “I find an energy in the exhausted figuration that’s rich in metaphor that maybe I can’t find in abstraction.”

A tangle of brambles dominating the bottom half of one of his canary paintings builds up in dashes of earthen tones. The Celt notes this portion could be an abstract by Pollock.

Cy Twombly comes to Stephen’s mind.

“There’s this push-pull of things staking a claim to the space they’re going to be in. I think the whole practice is about trying to invigorate the painting in ways that are surprising to me - so they don’t follow set rules,” he says.

He later adds: “Maybe that’s fundamentally what they are - a series of questions or challenges wrapped up in a rectangle - they spin out in different directions that can start a conversation on environmentalism, or Ukraine or sitting at home watching TV, there’s a range of possibility that’s useful.”

Stephen, a dad of three, attests to having a positive outlook, and views the paintings as optimistic works. “Definitely the fact that they even exist is optimistic. To make things is to be optimistic,” he says generally, and then adds specifically of the birds in the painting. “They’re looking to the future aren’t they - they’re not looking backwards.”

The Celt notes that to paint a banana is to bring up Andy Warhol’s famous artwork for the cover of The Velvet Underground’s debut album. He hadn’t made the link, even though he had been listening to Lou Reed’s band a lot while painting the works.

“One of the big parts of what I do - I’m really interested in the subconscious of method - you pack your brain full of stuff, and then stuff comes out, so the subconscious factory is a kind of driving force in this. There’s elements in it and I don’t know they are there, they come to a sense rather than arriving from sense.”

As an aside, Stephen recalls a time when he actually met Lou Reed while working in a hotel in London. It was time for Reed and his entourage to check out, and Stephen went to help with his bags.

“I had a master key and was saying ‘Mr Reed?’ - and there was no-one there. There was a balcony and he was out there doing Tai Chi and he flung himself at me at 100 miles an hour to karate chop me - I was like, ‘Woh!’ He stopped and was like, ‘Oh sorry, I thought you were an intruder.’ But he was really funny about it. I think I would have beaten him up,” he jokes.

Stephen Dunne’s ‘A Paradise of Paradox and Pardon’ runs at Townhall Theatre Cavan until Saturday, July 22.