William irvine - Courthouse Gallery Fine Art

William irvine
william irvine
Ebb and Flow
july 23–august 17, 2014
Essay by Daniel Kany
Man and His Dog, 2013, oil on board, 12 x 16 inches
cover
The White Cloud, 2014, oil on board, 26 x 36 inches
6 court street ellsworth, maine 04605
courthousegallery.com
207 667 6611
Irvine’s work, to my mind, has furthered the vision of these three modernists
[Hartley, Marin, and Avery]. He, too, transforms elements of the landscape into
abstract entities, innovates in line and color, and grasps the essential in the
world before him. Drawing on a vital sense of place and a passion for paint,
over the past half century he has brought forth a body of work that has earned
him a special place in Maine and American art.
— Carl Little, William Irvine: A Painter’s Journey
The Beachcomber’s Table, 2014, oil on canvas, 32 x 36 inches
Blue Moon Over Tinkers, 2014, oil on board, 26 x 36 inches
Cloud Passing Over Tinkers, 2014, oil on board, 26 x 36 inches
william irvinE
sand-scrubbed to the essentials: The Paintings of William Irvine
by Daniel Kany
S
Bringing in the Wash, 2013, oil on board, 16 x 20 inches
tart with an abstract painting: a trio of soft-edged horizontal
bands. A lobster boat chugs across the scene—painting
another band with its foamy white wake.
A woman in a yellow housecoat hangs out laundry in front
of her tiny white-scrubbed house. The windy day makes her flail
about no less than the yellow blown cloth she tries to subdue.
Fisherman’s gloves, a knife and some roughly cut mackerel
sit on a simple surface before the ocean. It’s a painting of a bait
table. Handled with reductively minimal modernism, it a cubist painting. It could be a portrait of the absent fisherman, a
thought poem about cutting bait or the imagination-reanimated
remnants of a morning walk on the beach.
A solid stream of angled cloud shoots down towards a black
sliver of an island past which a Lilliputian sailboat makes its way.
Over its gray underside, the cylindrical cloud is a cascading river
of white light. Vast and important, it is a vision.
While the images are scrubbed sea-glass-like to their essentials
by the sand-churning ebb and flow of memory, these canvases
by Brooklin, Maine artist William Irvine are thick with paint.
No less sophisticated than they are bold, bright and reductive,
the scenes take part in a world of dynamically balanced forms
in which Nature—sublime, beautiful and uncompromising—is
the spark for the celebration of human vision: painting.
The Bait Table, 2014, oil on canvas, 30 x 36 inches
Born in 1931 in Troon, Scotland in 1931, Irvine studied
painting and began his art career in Britain. He has been
a painter for his entire professional life.
Irvine met an American woman in 1958, and they
married. A few years later while perusing a newspaper sent
from the States, Irvine came across an ad for a hundred
acres and a farmhouse in Maine. So Maine came to Irvine
like a wishful dream; in turn, Irvine came to Maine and
ultimately found that dream.
In London, Irvine’s abstractions reflected European
painters like Howard Hodgkin (b. 1932) and the Russianborn Nicolas de Staël (1914–1955), but also American
painting, particularly second-generation Abstract Expressionism.
In Maine, Irvine found a place that suited his artistic
sensibilities, and he switched to painting the landscape.
Because his work was driven by processes of memory and
personal spirit, the fresh place of Maine probably had a
great deal of appeal over nightmare-tortured postwar
Europe. In particular, Irvine found his imagination stimulated by the simple houses of Down East fishermen, with
each representing individual worlds. To this day, Irvine’s
paintings revisit the textured memories of his first travels
through Down East harbor towns like Addison, Corea
and Jonesport.
From the beginning, Irvine’s Maine paintings had a
reductive and fundamental sensibility. Their apparent
elemental simplicity makes them accessible. They are,
after all, very easy to look at. But this is precisely because
of the work Irvine does to bring into balance their two
driving forces: abstraction and representation.
In The White Cloud (2014), for example, Irvine shows
a sailboat moving along a black sliver of an island on a
blue sea. The purple sky is dominated by a giant rectangular white and gray cloud that seems to reach up and
across it. However simple it may seem, White Cloud is a
powerful image that hits with a force so poignant it feels
mystical. But its true power comes from resolving towards
neither the scene represented nor the abstract structure of
the painting. The boat is a sort of visual fulcrum lodged
under the rectangular cloud by a sharp triangular wedge
of sky. The boat is visually pulled along by an extremely
subtle team of five seagulls fluttering from near the boat
towards the right edge of the image. And the shape of the
boat’s three sails also performs a lobster-tail-like transformation moving from left to right—beginning with a rectangle and then a pair of progressively smaller triangles that
create a sort of muscular, physical form in dialogue with
the other-worldly wedge of sky pointing the way.
It is an extremely sophisticated painting, but not in
terms of metaphors or erudition: All of the concerns
of The White Cloud develop right before your eyes.
Irvine looks to Marsden Hartley, for example, not as
a reference but as inspiration for a shape-driven and
intimidatingly powerful view of Nature. Milton Avery
similarly appears through the edges of shapes softened
so that the forms dominate and the lines are all slowed
to a pleasantly calm crawl.
The White Cloud, 2014, oil on board, 26 x 36 inches
Table with Crabs, 2014, oil on canvas, 36 x 40 inches
You will not find slashing strokes shooting through Irvine’s
compositions. Instead, his smudgy edges are deliberate and
thoughtful. To achieve this, Irvine almost always paints with
paper towels and palette knives instead of a brush. His approach
allows him to work quickly (Irvine prefers to make paintings
in one go to keep his focus on the original thread of the work)
and with a great deal of oil paint—which tends to get muddy
when pushed around the surface with a brush. The paper towel
allows Irvine—without dripping turpentine or a dirty brush—to
put wet paint on wet paint, pat it for texture, smear it when he
wants, soften it, build it up or remove it.
The result is that Irvine can create dense surfaces featuring
a slow and luxurious materiality that fuels the elemental intensity of the underlying geometric forms and overall composition.
Irvine begins his paintings by responding to the shape of the
canvas: “The rectangle is a resting place for shapes—whether in
a painting of my table or my house. I use shapes more than anything else to try to bring together the final expression. Once they
are on the canvas, my shapes more or less determine where they
should be. They find their own resting places.”
In other words, Irvine begins with the conjoined idea of
organized vision and painting. He then shifts the underlying
shapes to make his paintings come together. These organizing
forms are not scaffolding hidden under the main event: They are
the main event.
While the original ideas well from observation, memory is the
driving thought process in Irvine’s work. But after repeated
reconsideration of the scene, Irvine shifts from capturing a sense
of place and its most important qualities to letting the concerns
Nocturnal Nude, 2013, oil on panel, 12 x 16 inches
Spring Morning, 2014, oil on board, 12 x 16 inches
of painting drive his decisions. In other words, starting a painting
and finishing it are very different things for Irvine. “At some
point,” he explains, “the painting takes over. It determines what
you’re going to do next. It tells you what to do and you listen to
it. If I impose my thoughts and intellect on a painting, it doesn’t
turn out well. It’s not only the key to getting a good painting, but
it surprises you.”
The ability to be surprised by his work is a critical point of
Irvine’s paintings. It means he can get outside of them and see
them as a viewer. And it means that what we see isn’t Irvine’s
internal world, but a shared vision—the culture of painting. It’s a
way of feeling as well as seeing. It combines spirit with sensibility
and vision. And it implies what the artist can bring to the public
through his paintings: “In general, good paintings are spiritual.
There’s an uplift in your sensitivity and your feelings. In a broad
sense, they are spiritual. That’s how I judge my paintings: whether
they have that feeling.”
While the original fuel for his work may be mined from
memory, in the end Irvine’s standard is the here-and-now feeling
of any painting. For it to ever leave his studio, a painting has to
feel right to William Irvine.
Art historian Daniel Kany is the award-winning art critic for the Maine Sunday
Telegram and the Portland Press Herald. He is the author of numerous artist
catalogs and books. He lives with his family in Cumberland, Maine.
The Fisherman’s Cottage, 2014, oil on board, 26 x 32 inches
Heading Home II
oil on canvas
36 x 66 inches
2014
Clouds Breakig Over Tinkers, 2014, oil on board, 26 x 36 inches
The Long Cloud, 2014, oil on canvas, 30 x 40 inches
Out of the Storm, 2014, oil on board, 26 x 36 inches
Passing Tinkers, 2014, oil on canvas, 30 x 36 inches
Woman Planting a Tree
oil on board
11 x 14 inches
2014
Man with Oar
oil on board
16 x 20 inches
2013
The Scallop Sea, 2014, oil on board, 26 x 36 inches
Boats at Anchor, 2013, oil on canvas, 36 x 40 inches
Three Boats at Anchor, 2013, oil on canvas, 40 x 60 inches
Table with Sea Urchins, 2014, oil on canvas, 30 x 40 inches
The Lobsterman’s Table, 2014, oil on canvas, 30 x 40 inches
The Bait Table, 2014, oil on canvas, 30 x 36 inches
The Abandoned Table, 2014, oil on canvas, 30 x 36 inches
Table with Two Lobsters, 2014, oil on canvas, 30 x 36 inches
Setting The Trap, 2014, oil on canvas, 36 x 54 inches
Into the Sun, 2014, oil on board, 26 x 34 inches
Moonlight Harbor, 2013, oil on board, 26 x 36 inches
Mother and Child, 2014, oil on canvas, 36 x 40 inches
The Clamdigger’s Table, 2014, oil on canvas, 32 x 36 inches
Heading Out
oil on canvas
40 x 72 inches
2014
Last Light II, 2014, oil on board, 26 x 34 inches
Night Harbor, 2014, oil on board, 26 x 36 inches
Leaving the Harbor, Scotland
oil on panel
16 x 20 inches
2013
Evening Stroll
oil on board
16 x 20 inches
2014
Scottish Headland, 2014, oil on board, 30 x 40 inches
digital montage jeffery becton
william irvine
BORN Troon, Scotland
ONE PERSON EXHIBITIONS
Courthouse Gallery Fine Art, Ellsworth, ME 2012, 2014
Gleason Gallery, Boothbay Harbor, ME 2011–2013
Leighton Gallery, Blue Hill, ME 1986–2011
Firehouse Gallery, Damariscotta, ME 2002–2009
Studio E, Palm Beach, FL 2003–2006
Shaw Gallery, Northeast Harbor, ME 2003, ’05, ’07
McGrath Dunham Gallery, Castine, ME 2001–2006
George Marshall Store Gallery, York, ME 2005
Eastland Gallery, Portland, ME 2001
Carnegie Museum, University of Maine, Orono, ME 2000
Davidson and Daughters, Portland, ME 1996, 1999
Leighton Gallery, Westford, MA 1982, 1995
Art Alliance, Philadelphia, PA 1993
June Fitzpatrick Gallery, Portland, ME 1992
Bayview Gallery, Portland, ME 1989
Noel Butcher Gallery, Philadelphia, PA 1982-–1986
John Little Gallery, Clark University, Worcester, MA 1980
Rudolph Gallery, Woodstock, NY and Miami, FL 1968–1976
Drian Gallery, London, England 1960, 1962
Parton Gallery, London, England 1960
McLellan Gallery, Glasgow, Scotland 1958
Carnegie Library, Ayr, Scotland 1949
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
Courthouse Gallery Fine Art, Ellsworth, ME 2007–present
Gleason Gallery, Boothbay Harbor, ME 2011–present
George Marshall Store Gallery, York, ME 2007–present
Greenhut Gallery, Portland, ME 2006–present
Elan Gallery, Rockport, ME 2007
Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockport, ME 2006–2013
Turtle Gallery, Deer Isle, ME 2006
Penobscot Marine Museum at Searsport, ME 2002
Marine Environmental Research Institute, Blue Hill, ME 2001
Monmouth Museum, Lincroft, NJ 1984
Mast Cove Gallery, Kennebunkport, ME
Gregory Boon Gallery, Santa Fe, NM
Congress Square Gallery, Portland, ME
National Endowment for the Arts, Washington, DC
Munson Gallery, New Haven, CT 1982
American Art Cultural Center, Washington, DC 1978
Shore Gallery, Boston, MA 1970–1973
Portal Gallery, London, England
Artists International Association, London, England
Blue Hill Library, Blue Hill, ME
Scottish Arts Council, Edinburgh, Scotland 1953
PUBLIC AND CORPORATE COLLECTIONS
University of Maine Museum of Art, Bangor, ME
Courthouse Gallery Fine Art, Ellsworth, ME
Hand and Flower Press, London, England
Marine Environmental Research Institute, Blue Hill, ME
Rouse Corporation, Pittsbugh, PA
Scottish Arts Council, Edinburgh, Scotland
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Down East Magazine, Kim Ridley, April 2010
Maine Home + Design, Suzanne McEvoy, August 2008
Maine Painters, Carl Little, editor, September 2006
Maine Sunday Telegram, Philip Isaacson 2001
Maine Times, Feature Article, Donna Gold 2000
Bangor Daily News, Feature Article 1999, 2000
Art New England, Carl Little 2000
Portland Press Herald 1992, 1999
Maine Sunday Telegram, Ken Greenleaf 1996
Preview 1993
The Maine Times 1991
The Philadelphia Inquirer 1983
ArtNews, Ann Jarmusch 1983
Maine Life 1979
The London Observer 1960
education
Glasgow School of Art, DA
Calling in the Cats, 2013, oil on board, 16 x 20 inches
6 court street ellsworth, maine 04605
courthousegallery.com
207 667 6611

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