Drawing on the land for pleasure

Ocean Frequency is an exhibition of new work by Donald Teskey at the Oliver Sears Gallery in Dublin.

The event coincides with the 20th anniversary of Teskey’s very first solo show.

The landscape of north Mayo, where Teskey undertook a residency at the Ballinglen Arts Foundation in 2011, inspired this latest body of work.

“I’ve always been drawn to archetypal themes,” says Teskey. “Landscape, for instance, and the sea are very archetypal as subject matter. With that structure I find I can explore the process of painting very well. And everything is underpinned by my love of drawing.”

Teskey’s work looks at conjunction points in nature. Where the ocean meets the land is a particular pre-occupation in this show. The wild elemental forces of the wind and sea are expressed through layers of loose paintwork. “I’ve always been more interested in the process of painting than the subject matter, in a sense,” he says. “But I’ve developed in such a way that I couldn’t extract one from the other. I love painting in this kind of environment where you’ve got elements clashing.”

While Teskey may spend weeks considering the landscapes depicted in his paintings, he has various means of transforming what he sees into the final work.

“For a period of time I didn’t paint outdoors,” he says. “I was painting from photography and drawings. I did draw, I used my sketchbook extensively. I needed the sketchbook to be a means of processing what was in front of me. Putting it in the sketchbook, selecting what I wanted to work with, extracting the graphic nature of the images so I could use that as the basis of a painting.

“So the paintings were then removed from the actual original subject matter, they become transformed into something quite different. I still use the sketchbook, even for these paintings.”

Teskey graduated from Limerick School of Art & Design in 1979. “I spent 10 years drawing without painting. It was that kind of awareness of the graphic quality of images and then dealing with the variety of tone which is achieved with such minimal means. When I started painting, around the beginning of the 1990s, I had a firm idea of what I was about.”

Ocean Frequency contains work that ranges in scale from modest up to an enormous diptych that occupies an entire wall in the gallery. Surprisingly, Teskey finds that small scale work is more challenging. The large canvases somehow happen faster.

“Physically there’s a lot more involved, but often painting on a big scale has its own momentum because everything is broader and more generalised. Whereas on a small scale you really have to focus and get everything just right.

“One of the things I’ve felt I would like to do in my paintings is place the viewer in the scene where I was standing to create an immersive quality, so you’re part of the painting as well. You’re experiencing it as I might have.”

*Runs until Apr 18