Martin Gale and Charles Tyrrell: A 50-year friendship born of student uprisings and a love of art
Charles Tyrrell and Martin Gale have a joint exhibition at the Sarah Walker Gallery in Castletownbere.
Martin Gale and Charles Tyrrell are both painters, though their work could hardly be more different; Gale is known for his portrayals of human and animal figures in highly detailed landscape settings, while Tyrrell has stuck resolutely to abstraction throughout his career. Their work can be seen, this month and next, in a joint exhibition called In Parallel at the Sarah Walker Gallery in Castletownbere, Co Cork.
Gale is based in Co Kildare, and Tyrrell in Allihies, on the Beara peninsula in West Cork, but the two have been close friends since they first met, at the National Gallery of Art and Design in 1968. Both remember that NCAD was peaceful enough to begin with. For two years, they attended the practical workshops required of Foundation students before they could proceed to the traditional three-year School of Painting programme.
“It would have been the same sort of schooling that happened in France and England, but a century earlier,” says Tyrrell. “It was figurative based. You worked from the antique statue. You started at the feet, and worked your way up to the head. You didn’t get into the life room until 3rd Year.”
The students, and particularly those who’d familiarised themselves with contemporary art, soon wearied of this style of teaching. Gale remembers being taken by the Pop Art he’d seen in London, while Tyrrell was smitten by the Abstract Expressionism he’d encountered while working in Boston in the summers.
“Around the end of our second year, there was a bit of a revolution,” says Gale. This is to put it mildly; for the first time in NCAD’s history, the students refused to engage with the curriculum.
“There were protests and lock-ins. We were sleeping in the college and everything. The student body kind of broke into three sections; those who went off and did teaching; those who became very involved in politics; and those like me and Charlie, who went to all the meetings, and supported the revolt, but were also really interested in getting on with the work.”
The authorities dithered over how to react. And so, for their last three years in college, the students were effectively left to their own devices. “We took over this whole gallery space in the college,” says Tyrrell. “The tutors would barely set foot in it. You could say there was a fair degree of anarchy at large, but there was some very good work being done.”
Tyrrell had his first exhibition at the Project Arts Centre before he even graduated. “NCAD didn’t want to release my paintings because, technically, any work that’s done by a student is actually the property of the college. This was being thrown at me, but we were all too arrogant to entertain that or to worry about it. A big team of us carried my whole exhibition of paintings - this train of canvases - from NCAD to the gallery on South King St.”
Gale had a two-man show with another contemporary, Johnny Davidson, at the Davis Gallery in 1972. “Funnily enough, the professor of painting at NCAD, John Kelly, came to the opening. I think it was the first time he'd ever seen our work.”
As young graduates, all three submitted work to the annual Irish Exhibition of Living Art. “I got rejected the first year,” says Gale. “But I got in the next year, when Johnny Davidson won first prize. I was working in a pea factory in Northamptonshire that summer, and I got word that two of my paintings had sold. One went for sixty quid, the other for forty. And that was it; I gave up the peas for the painting.”
Tyrrell stayed on in Dublin for ten years or so after graduating, before decamping for Allihies, while Gale relocated to Co Wicklow almost immediately. Later, he moved to Co Kildare, where he has been settled for many years.
As an artist, he has always taken inspiration from the natural world, but to label his paintings as ‘landscapes’ would be to misunderstand his intentions. “I don’t do scenery,” he says. “The landscape just happens to be where the paintings are set. It’s the starting point, but not the subject. A lot of what’s in my paintings is made up.”
A number of his new paintings feature anxious birds flying through copses of trees. “That idea began with a book of Johnny Cash’s poetry,” he says. “One poem in the book is called The Dogs Are In The Wood, and the next line is ‘And the hunting’s looking good.’ So this is not Wordsworth, you know, but the title stuck in my head. You don’t see any dogs in the painting, but there are all these startled birds, flying in one direction. We don’t know why, but for some reason they’ve been startled.
“When I was working on that painting, just after Christmas, there was a lot on the News about fleeing refugees, that was in the air at the time.”
Despite living between the mountains and the sea in Allihies, Tyrrell has never felt tempted to paint the landscape. Indeed, most of his work over the past 50 years has begun with a fascination with the grid. His new works are among his most minimalistic, layers and layers of paint built up to what he calls “an absence of colour.”
“With these paintings,” he says. “I started building grids by placing random elements on the canvas. One square here, one there, two there. And then, it's really just a case of pulling them all together into a unified whole. If these paintings are about anything, it’s the awkward accommodation that has to take place, the twisting and turning to pull things together. They’ve ended up being very interesting and elegant. There’s a three-dimensional element to them, but that’s a complete by-product. I have no control over that.”
After all these years, neither artist has ever regretted their choice of career, or indeed, their approach to painting. But surely each must, at some point in time, have felt tempted to try out the other’s technique?
“No,” says Tyrrell. “Never. Though I do remember sitting down to do some landscape drawing one time; I ended up writing ‘Sky’ on the top of the page, and ‘Grass’ below. I just don’t do depiction.”
Has Gale ever looked at Tyrrell’s work, and thought, I could do that? “Or a five-year-old child could do it?” he laughs. “No, I have great respect for what Charlie does, but he’s followed his own path as an artist, and I’ve followed mine. That’s why the name of the exhibition, In Parallel, is so apt.”
- In Parallel: Martin Gale and Charles Tyrrell continues at the Sarah Walker Gallery, Castletownbere until September 17
- Further information: sarahwalkergallery.com
