Mermaid Arts Centre, October 2016
Many of Helen G. Blake’s oil paintings at the Mermaid Arts Centre are small-scale, no bigger than book covers: abstract colour studies on linen canvases that give, immediately, a sense of decorative harmony. In fact, the first impression, upon meeting these works in the upstairs gallery, is of a bright, decorous order: interlocking diamonds, squares, jagged lines repeated over and over, complex geometric interweavings. They seem, at first sight, to suggest an almost machine-generated precision, reminding me of certain Vorticist works – maybe Wyndham Lewis’s Workshop of 1914-15, with its combination of expressive pinks, yellows, blues, contained within a determinate geometric framework; though perhaps her work is closer in spirit to that of Helen Saunders, who never seemed to quite share the industrial determinism of her Vorticist colleagues.
Similarly, the initial impression of strict regimentation in Blake’s work collapses under closer scrutiny. And these paintings, with their small scale, their careful detailing, demand closer scrutiny. What seem like grids and interlocking patterns are not so streamlined or exact as first appear. Colours and textures have been applied over one another; patterns have been allowed to emerge out of successive layerings, rather than being planned and preordained. This is a slow process, given the successive drying times; this imbues the works, I think, with a degree of meditation, a thoughtful quality. Every layer imbues or guides the next, creating a complex palimpsest.
Each of these works repays individual attention, yielding – gradually – a specific set of visual effects and resonances. In the smaller of the two rooms of the Mermaid Gallery, for instance, A Formal Introduction (all works, 2016) is an elaborate Tetris-like arrangement of block forms, like a set of solid grey steps against a grid of primrose; examined closer, however, a further concealed grid of pink and green and sky blue complicates the arrangement. Four repeated maroon-coloured bars, meanwhile, invite a sidelong look, reorienting the viewer. This effortlessly Byzantine compression of arrangements seems an appropriate ‘introduction’ to Blake’s work. Likewise, in the larger room, Blue Kisses is founded upon a central panel of pale-blue squares, surrounded by a coat of warm grey; the central panel almost obscured under a militant cobalt-blue X, edged with Indian-yellow fronds, emblazoned on top of the canvas. This arrangement seems almost centripetal, drawing the eye compulsively into the painting’s crisp autumnal nexus.
Taken individually, these concentrated colour-studies might convey a mesmeric quality; nevertheless, the mood of the overall show remains light, imbued with a sense of informality. You can sense the painter’s pleasure as well as their compunction: these arrangements of pure colour are satisfactions in themselves. You get a sense, in the gallery, of a serious artist at play. There are no theatrics to this work. Instead, their effectiveness seems to come from their steady pursuit of practical questions, enigmatic painterly conundrums. Their interlocking patterns play against each other in different ways across the picture plane, constantly shifting the centre of focus for the viewer, resisting definition. Blake’s arrangements are full of internal contestation.
One particular struggle that suggests itself is between the almost-austere composure of these rectilinear abstract works, on the one hand, and on the other, their obvious exuberance. In Fluffy Bunny, for instance, a geometric arrangement in Mikado-pink frames two soft grey lozenges: look a little longer and they become the diamond-shaped, maybe villainous eyes of a comic-book rabbit. Stand back and many of Blake’s geometric arrangements begin to yield organic playful forms: a tree-trunk, an autumn leaf, an eye. These are pastoral subjects, and Blake does operate in rural settings; her studio is in Wicklow; these paintings were produced at a residency at the Model in Sligo. However, her work is anything but bucolic. Instead, Blake has developed a particular and distinct visual language, a kind of organic abstraction.
This language emerges out of the specifics of her practice. Her work is assembled by increment, through accumulations of pattern, sequence, and colour. The process is methodical, but also slow, thoroughgoing, and capacious enough to embrace flaws, accidents, and discrepancies. In fact, at times Blake’s work seems to echo certain hand-crafted traditions: Slow Burning brings to mind, for me, the courtly delicately-bound cover of a fifteenth-century manuscript; Banquet, on the other hand, looks like a medieval bedspread. These aren’t, though, gothic or retrogressive gestures. Rather they seem like meditations on craftsmanship: on the attentive processes of the hand. After all, like Blake’s approach to painting, book-binding and embroidery require meticulous concentration on a resolutely small scale. Elsewhere, the work is lightened by surreal touches: Fluffy Bunny is a case in point, or Looking at Queen Maeve, with its blocky, tightly-interwoven patterns, like the ornamental borders of a Celtic manuscript.
This last work was produced during the artist’s residency at the Model, Sligo, in 2016. Layers of rich purplish-brown form a repeated pattern across the canvas, a vertical line with a trapezoidal bump at each end. Having finished it, and looking out the window of her studio, she realised that, turning the painting sideways, the violet wedge-shaped humps in the design corresponded exactly to a protuberance in the landscape, the burial mound on the top of Knocknarea, where the tomb of Queen Maeve is said to lie; hence the title of the work. This infiltration of the visual environment into the work is – as she describes it – a result of the strict, self-imposed constraints of her practice. Instead of dictating the shape of her work at the outset, Blake’s process allows unconscious patterns, the patient fruits of slow looking, to gradually emerge.
Such unexpected associations run like rich undercurrents beneath the interplay of colours and patterns across the surfaces of this careful and meditative exhibition. They are allowed to emerge out of the tension between plan and chance. These aren’t at all the symmetrical, stream-lined grids I took them for at first. Instead they are processual, rhythmic. ‘Rhythm’ is a word that has been used several times to describe Blake’s work. And these canvases do feel musical, lyrical – maybe even, viewed as a set, orchestral.
Dr Nathan O’Donnell is a writer of fiction and criticism and one of the co-editors of Paper Visual Art Journal. He is the Irish Research Council Enterprise Postdoctoral Fellow, Freud Project – a two-year programme of research in relation to the IMMA Collection: Freud Project.
Many of Helen G. Blake’s oil paintings at the Mermaid Arts Centre are small-scale, no bigger than book covers: abstract colour studies on linen canvases that give, immediately, a sense of decorative harmony. In fact, the first impression, upon meeting these works in the upstairs gallery, is of a bright, decorous order: interlocking diamonds, squares, jagged lines repeated over and over, complex geometric interweavings. They seem, at first sight, to suggest an almost machine-generated precision, reminding me of certain Vorticist works – maybe Wyndham Lewis’s Workshop of 1914-15, with its combination of expressive pinks, yellows, blues, contained within a determinate geometric framework; though perhaps her work is closer in spirit to that of Helen Saunders, who never seemed to quite share the industrial determinism of her Vorticist colleagues.
Similarly, the initial impression of strict regimentation in Blake’s work collapses under closer scrutiny. And these paintings, with their small scale, their careful detailing, demand closer scrutiny. What seem like grids and interlocking patterns are not so streamlined or exact as first appear. Colours and textures have been applied over one another; patterns have been allowed to emerge out of successive layerings, rather than being planned and preordained. This is a slow process, given the successive drying times; this imbues the works, I think, with a degree of meditation, a thoughtful quality. Every layer imbues or guides the next, creating a complex palimpsest.
Each of these works repays individual attention, yielding – gradually – a specific set of visual effects and resonances. In the smaller of the two rooms of the Mermaid Gallery, for instance, A Formal Introduction (all works, 2016) is an elaborate Tetris-like arrangement of block forms, like a set of solid grey steps against a grid of primrose; examined closer, however, a further concealed grid of pink and green and sky blue complicates the arrangement. Four repeated maroon-coloured bars, meanwhile, invite a sidelong look, reorienting the viewer. This effortlessly Byzantine compression of arrangements seems an appropriate ‘introduction’ to Blake’s work. Likewise, in the larger room, Blue Kisses is founded upon a central panel of pale-blue squares, surrounded by a coat of warm grey; the central panel almost obscured under a militant cobalt-blue X, edged with Indian-yellow fronds, emblazoned on top of the canvas. This arrangement seems almost centripetal, drawing the eye compulsively into the painting’s crisp autumnal nexus.
Taken individually, these concentrated colour-studies might convey a mesmeric quality; nevertheless, the mood of the overall show remains light, imbued with a sense of informality. You can sense the painter’s pleasure as well as their compunction: these arrangements of pure colour are satisfactions in themselves. You get a sense, in the gallery, of a serious artist at play. There are no theatrics to this work. Instead, their effectiveness seems to come from their steady pursuit of practical questions, enigmatic painterly conundrums. Their interlocking patterns play against each other in different ways across the picture plane, constantly shifting the centre of focus for the viewer, resisting definition. Blake’s arrangements are full of internal contestation.
One particular struggle that suggests itself is between the almost-austere composure of these rectilinear abstract works, on the one hand, and on the other, their obvious exuberance. In Fluffy Bunny, for instance, a geometric arrangement in Mikado-pink frames two soft grey lozenges: look a little longer and they become the diamond-shaped, maybe villainous eyes of a comic-book rabbit. Stand back and many of Blake’s geometric arrangements begin to yield organic playful forms: a tree-trunk, an autumn leaf, an eye. These are pastoral subjects, and Blake does operate in rural settings; her studio is in Wicklow; these paintings were produced at a residency at the Model in Sligo. However, her work is anything but bucolic. Instead, Blake has developed a particular and distinct visual language, a kind of organic abstraction.
This language emerges out of the specifics of her practice. Her work is assembled by increment, through accumulations of pattern, sequence, and colour. The process is methodical, but also slow, thoroughgoing, and capacious enough to embrace flaws, accidents, and discrepancies. In fact, at times Blake’s work seems to echo certain hand-crafted traditions: Slow Burning brings to mind, for me, the courtly delicately-bound cover of a fifteenth-century manuscript; Banquet, on the other hand, looks like a medieval bedspread. These aren’t, though, gothic or retrogressive gestures. Rather they seem like meditations on craftsmanship: on the attentive processes of the hand. After all, like Blake’s approach to painting, book-binding and embroidery require meticulous concentration on a resolutely small scale. Elsewhere, the work is lightened by surreal touches: Fluffy Bunny is a case in point, or Looking at Queen Maeve, with its blocky, tightly-interwoven patterns, like the ornamental borders of a Celtic manuscript.
This last work was produced during the artist’s residency at the Model, Sligo, in 2016. Layers of rich purplish-brown form a repeated pattern across the canvas, a vertical line with a trapezoidal bump at each end. Having finished it, and looking out the window of her studio, she realised that, turning the painting sideways, the violet wedge-shaped humps in the design corresponded exactly to a protuberance in the landscape, the burial mound on the top of Knocknarea, where the tomb of Queen Maeve is said to lie; hence the title of the work. This infiltration of the visual environment into the work is – as she describes it – a result of the strict, self-imposed constraints of her practice. Instead of dictating the shape of her work at the outset, Blake’s process allows unconscious patterns, the patient fruits of slow looking, to gradually emerge.
Such unexpected associations run like rich undercurrents beneath the interplay of colours and patterns across the surfaces of this careful and meditative exhibition. They are allowed to emerge out of the tension between plan and chance. These aren’t at all the symmetrical, stream-lined grids I took them for at first. Instead they are processual, rhythmic. ‘Rhythm’ is a word that has been used several times to describe Blake’s work. And these canvases do feel musical, lyrical – maybe even, viewed as a set, orchestral.
Dr Nathan O’Donnell is a writer of fiction and criticism and one of the co-editors of Paper Visual Art Journal. He is the Irish Research Council Enterprise Postdoctoral Fellow, Freud Project – a two-year programme of research in relation to the IMMA Collection: Freud Project.