Appliance of science to his art

THERE is a simplicity to Billy Foley’s new work at the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin.

The white space dominates; the lines are in primary colours. In each of the paintings, they appear to dance, ribbon-like, around a central, blank plain. It’s all in contrast to his earlier works, when the lines were more tangled, reminiscent of nebula in outer space; or, when muddier colours dominated his palette, evoking the knottiness of the natural world.

It’s tempting to read in these paintings a 20-year career as a process of refinement: the shapes and patterns are recognisably Foley, but it appears he has, in retrospect, been on a journey to this cleaner, clearer vision.

The Cork-based artist himself agrees he’s not really strayed from the path he set out on. “I’ve been searching in the same area all the time,” he says. “Looking at this relationship of space and form. I don’t think I’ve deviated from that too much, so in one sense I have refined and refined all along. It’s not that I’m trying to get to the end of something, but that I’ve been focused in a certain direction. In one sense, I maybe once thought I might have reached an end, a stage that would have led me into something else, but every time I look into it, it opens up new things.”

What that “it” is might be difficult to discern from abstract, broadly expressionist work like Foley’s. But he explains it by going back to when he was learning his craft. As a painter learning about the relations between figure and landscape, Foley felt it was more interesting to explore what the two had in common, rather than the distinction between them that is the more traditional conception. “I don’t see myself as separated from the landscape. I see it all as one, and I’m trying to capture that.”

With this in mind, it is possible to see these Foley paintings as containing figures in the sense that there is a central space, separated by lines from the space around them, but it is a smooth, porous transition, a balance between interior and exterior fields. “When I think about these things, when I wonder, ‘Where do I exist in nature?’, I begin to ask, ‘What is the separation?’. I don’t understand it. We are the same; the space around us is the same as the space inside us. How that substance we are made of separates into individuality – that fascinates me, how to paint that. A portrait doesn’t then hold true to me: I feel I’m just painting a surface.

“I always felt that the form of a figure and of a landscape were the same. You used the same vocabulary to paint a mountain or a nose. How to arrange that vocabulary is what gives the image. So I become interested in the vocabulary: could I understand that, could I create my own landscape and figure? I didn’t see the difference between the vocabulary of form and space. If you look at reality it is very abstract.”

If that last statement seems to veer into science rather than the language of aesthetics, there is a good reason for that. Foley recalls early days reading art history and not seeing his intuitions discussed. He did, however, find a useful descriptive metaphor in science writing. Though he is by his own admission an armchair fan, he did find it enabling. “The way science and physics has moved, to that idea that we all are made of the same stuff. I related to that language. Looking at particle physics, the Uncertainty Principle, that is how I feel when I think about painting. That opened up a landscape to me. Science and art don’t have to be separated at all. Scientists are looking at reality too. The language in that was what I was looking for, that was the connection.”

The use of white, along with black, red, yellow and blue, gives an otherworldly feel to these paintings, as if we are seeing the first moments of creation, untainted by the organic muddiness of our world. There is a delicate balance at play, one that Foley admits did not come easy. “It wouldn’t work for me for many years. To get the reds, blues and yellows to work was hard — they tend to want to repel each other and you are trying to force them into uniting. I found that very difficult. I couldn’t separate them; I had to bring in organic tones.”

Foley has decided to tackle primary colours “one more time”. “The difference this time was that I was controlling with the white. I was able to manipulate the white a lot more, that got me able to work with them. As I worked more and more with the white, the greens and purples didn’t relate all that well. It was a step beyond that moment of creation: you had gone into the secondary. So, I pared back one by one all the secondary colours and I came up with a cobalt blue, a red cadmium and this yellow I use. It clicked with me — I realised what I was doing was like how light breaks into these fundamentals.”

The comparison with the earlier work is clear for Foley. “It amazes me that the earlier paintings have taken me to this. With the earlier work in the late ’90s it was very like looking into matter itself — very heavy, clumpy. It was like a ball of twine I had to unravel to see what this was made of. So, as I go I am still unravelling, to get it into simpler form and structure.

“Initially I did very mucky paintings: 10 years of muck and no one has seen them! But I am unravelling that all the time, and with this series in the RHA, for this first time I sit back and think. For the first time there is a satisfaction. There is less anxiety, I’m working the same area, but I don’t feel I’m going around in circles.”

* At the RHA until Apr 28