Artist happy to be out standing in her field

Going back to nature, to the source and the fields, it’s not a coincidence that I was painting like that while I was struggling with trying to create a life Cork painter Chára Nagle’s latest collection has seen her leave behind those bikini-clad bodies in favour of rural settings, writes Ellie O’Byrne.

“I use my camera as my sketchbook,” says artist Chára Nagle, describing the moment of inspiration that gave rise to her latest series of paintings. Driving past the family farm owned by her cousins in Kildare, Nagle pulled over and grabbed her camera from the boot of her car to photograph the scene.

“I just saw these big, round haystacks with this amazing sky,” she recalls. “It was autumn, and with the changing seasons, you always get more drama in the weather. There were these huge, dark, tumbling clouds.”

The field that grabbed Nagle’s attention was on land formerly owned by her late aunt, the scene of many childhood memories, but it’s taken the 43-year-old artist more than two decades to embrace a “back-to-basics” approach to exploring her roots, she says.

The CIT Crawford and NCAD graduate is best known for vivid acrylic paintings of the high life of the Celtic Tiger years with her ‘Moments I’ and ‘Moments II’ collections, which feature big, brash portrayals of bikini-clad sunbathers, champagne bottles and boats.

Now, there’s ‘Haystacks’, a series of 12 paintings, in which brooding skies dominate undulating fields stripped of their harvest and dotted with cylindrical bales. The palette is more muted and mature than in Nagle’s earlier work, but still

dramatic, and the landscape subject matter seems to have liberated her to work on texture over form.

“I’ve done the running around the world,” says Nagle. “The ‘Moments’ collections were an observation of the Celtic Tiger and a celebration of the excitement of those times, living life to the fullest, travelling, exploring, but I don’t want to tell that story again.”

It was a moment in Irish society, and we’re in a different moment now. In Nagle’s case, she links her new, more grounded subject matter, which has also seen her taking a departure in choice of materials, using tempera grassa paints made from organic egg, to her quest to conceive a baby.

“Going back to nature, to the source and the fields, it’s not a coincidence that I was painting like that while I was struggling with trying to create a life,” says Nagle.

Happily, her five-year journey, complete with unsuccessful fertility treatments, alternative therapies and nutritional regimens, has resulted in baby Alexander, now eight months old.

Nagle has lived in London and New York and is now based in Killiney. She grew up as one of a family of three girls on the Model Farm Road in Cork.

“As a kid, every Saturday after our double session in the pool in Douglas, mum would be trying to dry our hair and I’d be glued to The Wizard of Oz,” she says. “I just loved those colours. They made me so happy.”

A palette in glorious technicolour has always been a feature of Nagle’s large canvasses, from her ‘Moments’ collections right through to her more recent two-year stint as artist-in- residence at the Curragh Racecourse, where some of her ‘Portrait of a Horse’ collection can still be seen.

Racing scenes, all bright jockeys’ silks, dynamic energy and glossy horse flanks, provided ample material for Nagle, but she also aimed to hone her painterly skills in the notoriously difficult world of equine art, removing some of the early challenges of representation visible almost as a stylistic element in her earlier work.

“I had my first painter’s block painting horses,” she says. “I totally lost confidence and didn’t feel like I knew how to paint at all and had to stop for six weeks. There were a lot of tears. There was a lot of ‘why can’t I just have a

normal job, why do I have to be this mad person?’”

Having had early success in the commercial realm — her CN Designs company has worked with clients like Coca Cola, Guinness and BMW — Nagle says her aspirations are simple and at a remove from the academic associations and conceptual basis of much of Ireland’s current fine-art world. She sees the accessibility of her work as a merit.

“People sound apologetic when they stand in front of one of my paintings and say, ‘I know nothing about art, but I love this’. They’re not intimidated by it and they don’t feel like they have to second-guess themselves and, you know what, that’s when I’ve done my job. At the end of the day, I’m a tradesperson.”

Chára Nagle’s ‘Haystacks’ exhibition launch is on March 7 at Heritage House, St Stephen’s Green, Dublin. The exhibition runs until March 21.