Storm Force 10

Atrist's Statement

“The colours and forms of my work have always been dictated by the context of my life, and from this the work could be described as expressive. Someone once said that I paint the psychology of the landscape.

Storms have their own feelings and colours. Some are cold and hard like pewter and exclude you. Some are green and blue and sweep you in and submerge you. Winds gust up, filled with rain; they cloud your eyes so the colours of the land are thrown into the sky, and the clouds are scattered. You have to be out in the storm to know it.

I paint because I have to – if I do not make work I will make it step by step in my sleep. Since the age of four pictures have been my form of communicating with the world and I still strive to be more articulate.”

"IT'S ELEMENTAL"

The wind that whips across the Atlantic Ocean blows unhindered until it slashes into and bounces over the limestone walls of Kerry’s slanted shores. Linda Graham’s studio stands on a rolling ridge that looks over a few miles of sloping green Ireland to the Ocean of the World. St. Brendan’s home mountain looms in the distance, visible or not.

The art she makes there is as serious as a tough night in the emergency room. The paintings pulse with the rhythms of stippled waves and vascular blood. Linda Graham is the kindest fearsome person I have ever met – or the most fearsome kind person, probably the latter.

Her strict views from the edge of Ireland are exterior sights of interior feelings, all correlative to Kerry. The battering seas are indifferent to any small crux of a human who would cast themselves into that cold cauldron. But Linda has discovered a weird safety in an uncompromised respect for nature’s intermingled powers. This artist balances on the narrow fulcrum between the interior and the exterior, absorbing, then matching the outside world with internal strength and practiced technique. There is plenty of passion in the rendering, but there is also an ultimate calm in the comprehension of the whole.

The air in “Rock of Ages” is made palpable in settling mist and grey rain that sweeps across the canvas in textured paint, an effect that is just about lost when the painting is reduced to a photograph or a computer screen or a memory. Linda Graham’s work needs to be witnessed so closely that the warden should warn you off. Retreat to arm’s length, eventually back to the room’s reach, still focusing on the rippled bay, crowded sky, and the line of undulant hills between. Finally retrace your steps to the spot where you both see and feel the torque of sensation when paint turns into elements of air, elements of water, elements of earth -- all fused by Gaelic fire.

Jackson Pollack layered and twirled his paint into abstract stations of feeling. Linda’s manipulation of paint partakes of the same process, yet is of a piece with place. What became abstract out of Pollack’s can of cheap paint takes recognizable shape from Linda’s careful palette. The form she finds in a seascape is indeed “out there,” but the thick atmospheres swag across the canvas with a power that only an interior correspondence could engender. She transmutes inert pigments into gales and freshets by twisting paint into elemental life, born out of her heart and carried to canvas by decisive fingers.

Linda Graham is big hearted and kind, but she is also crushingly self-critical and as merciless as a meaded-up Viking when it comes to keeping or binning a current piece. She brings all of her prodigious self to the canvas and achieves that Romantic aim of turning a fleeting moment into a sublime and eternal artifact, ready to unleash its elemental power the instant it is perceived by a receptive viewer.

Linda’s reverence for Van Gogh is not unique, but it is remarkable. She ran away from home when she was fourteen to be near the Van Goghs in Amsterdam and found her way into a Dutch art school a couple of years later. Her practice, however, sets her apart, both from slavish imitators and the master himself. She has gone her own way. “Sun After Rain” has all the cosmic action of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” without the hyperbole. Such a cloud-whirled sky is not an unfamiliar sight on the coast of Kerry and it loses nothing in its translation to canvas. Know that every curl of line, every roll of color, every layer of texture is ultimately intentional, however fiercely formed. The paroxysm of weather may look like it has been laid down in a fever of work -- a fit of flow -- but there is control and order suffused throughout. She strives against -- and collaborates with -- the powers that make us most alive and ultimately do us in.

This exhibition awaits the final varnish that is applied by the public’s contemplation. Take your chances. Spend time with these paintings and breathe the bracing air of Ballinskelligs Bay, without having to brave the traffic jam at Moll’s Gap. All you need is a functional retina and the paintings will start working on you -- like a gale off the Atlantic.

James Bogan

James J. Bogan is Distinguished Professor of Art History and Film at the University of Missouri, U.S.A. He is one of the worlds leading authorities on William Blake and has several books and documentary films to his credit.

Wild Grey Atlantic