Charles Tyrrell: Staying on-grid with an impressive body of work
Charles Tyrrell has a new exhibition in Dublin.
Charles Tyrrell’s works in his New Paintings exhibition at the Taylor Galleries in Dublin have an unlikely genesis. In 2022, Tyrrell completed what he calls “the biggest outdoor permanent painting in Dublin.” The painting, Liffey Grid, was commissioned by IPUT Real Estate and was executed in vitreous enamel on interlocking steel panels before being installed as the gate entrance to the new Tropical Fruit Warehouse development on Sir John Rogerson’s Quay.
Tyrrell’s initial idea for the project was somewhat different to what he finished up with. “I had been making grid drawings, and I thought one of those would make an absolutely stunning gate,” he says. “But then, within a day or so, I realised that the purpose of the gate was to keep people out, and a design based on my drawings would make the perfect ladder, so that would not have worked at all.”
Undaunted, Tyrrell found a better solution. “I’d been thinking about working with vitreous enamel anyway, and I started experimenting with that in a factory on the Isle of Wight. The finished gate is like a jigsaw of 70 irregular shapes that make up this big grid 10 metres wide and four metres high.”
Over the past fifty years, since he graduated from the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, the grid has underpinned almost everything Tyrrell has accomplished as an artist. “It’s a very basic substructure that I’ve worked on,” he says. “Or worked over, if you like.”
His new paintings are, he says, much simpler than his previous series, and derive directly from the formal structures he developed for the Liffey Grid project. “I see the grid as having so many parallels and resonances in life,” he says. “I wouldn’t want to give the impression that what I’m doing is conceptually hanging on this notion, but it is there; these paintings are like maps of what it takes to organise – in terms of politics and society - all the twists and turns and compromises and accommodations that have to be made to pull everything together into some kind of unified whole.”
Tyrrell was won over by abstraction early on. “I’m pretty sure that I was the first person ever to put forward entirely non-representational abstract work for their degree show at NCAD. And I did it very, very consciously. In other words, I withheld all the figurative stuff I’d done. I was just so adamant and convinced by the power of the abstract. I’d been over and back to America as a student, and I’d seen all the abstract expressionists."
He cites Morris Louis as a big influence. "He was doing these lovely big pourings out of cans. That was a really important thing for me to see. It was like the easel was gone, and the canvas could be on the floor, or anywhere. Paint could be poured and flowed and so on. That got me going. In college, I more or less finished up there working on big stained canvases, just pouring paint within these strong simple geometric forms.”
Originally from Trim, Co Meath, Tyrrell stayed on in Dublin for some years after graduation, teaching and painting, but then in 1984 he decamped for Allihies, on the Beara peninsula in West Cork, where he has worked almost exclusively ever since. The area is home to any number of landscape painters, and he acknowledges that the landscape has influenced his own work as well.
“It’s in there,” he says. “Absolutely. Maybe not as directly in these new paintings, but the series I did before this were big aluminium squares that I just kind of dragged the paint across. Now, those are screaming landscape and the power of nature. While I regard myself as non-referential, I do have to have some connection with the elements. All those colours, in the metal paintings, are what I’ve experienced of the sea and the sky and the weather.”
Some of the artists he most admires today are sculptors. “Just now, I can’t get away from the Basque sculptor Eduardo Chillida. I’ve always loved his work, but in latter years I just have to look at any sculpture of his to be inspired and sustained. The same with Ulrich Ruckriem, the German sculptor, who works a lot with stone. It’s curious that it’s sculptors that give me so much at the moment.”
Over the years, Tyrrell has fashioned a number of works out of timber, cutting and scoring the surfaces, but he insists that these are paintings too, and he has no intention of becoming a sculptor himself. “I’m just a bit wary,” he says. “I think you gain an authority in a certain area, and you can’t assume you can just kind of willy-nilly jump into another discipline. I’ve often found that with sculptors, when they take on any painting or graphic type work, I’m never convinced by what they come up with. I’m afraid it would be the same if I became a sculptor.”
Nor is he ever likely to lose faith in abstraction. “Many of my favourite painters work with the figure. I find myself in Italy almost every summer, rummaging around the great Renaissance masters, and I absolutely wallow in that. I don’t make any direct connections to my own work, but it just kind of feeds you, seeing these artists. And I mean, you’re part of the whole thing, this continuum of painting.
“But I’ve always loved being in the abstract arena, and I have no inkling to shift from it. I think it’s a very vital, potent place to be.”
- Charles Tyrrell: New Paintings runs at the Taylor Galleries in Dublin until June 9; charlestyrrell.ie
