Recent Paintings

Speech by Ciaran Carson, on the opening of an Exhibition of New Paintings by Brian Ballard, The Kenny Gallery, 20th April 2003

For parts of the year, Brian resides in Inish Island off the coast of Donegal, in a house once inhabited by a sect popularly known at the Screamers, for their Primal Scream therapy, which they believed returned them to the moment of their birth. On calm nights, they were reputed to have been heard across the sound in Burtonport.

Mary, my five year old, is painting flowers. Concentrated strokes and dabs of colours, appearing, it would seem, the moment they are thought. Pansy: pensée, the french for thought. Not flowers, quite, but designs for flowers; flower as hieroglyph or emblem.

Sometimes the quicksilver island light is tilted and caught in mirrors, or is defined by a window-frame. It shiver son the rims of cups and bowls, and lends a sapphire tinge to a square-shouldered glass-stoppered bottle. The bottle itself contains a volume of bent light.

Ballard's flowers have taken shape in split-second brushstrokes, although we cannot know the intervals of time that separate them. They are fluttered by the sea breeze like a bunch of Buddhist prayer-windmills. This is not a still life. It shimmers on the edge of being, as if the flowers were about to leave the picture.

Sometimes the Screamers would assemble in the greenhouse; lying on their backs, staring at the trembling stars beyond, listening to the pulse of the Atlantic. Glass panes were wont to crack.

Blocks, scarps, planes and anticlines have been tumbled off the cliff face and lie broken-up within their shadows, washed over by a tide of black light. The rocks are shattered, stressed, refracted, as if, instead of a palette knife, the painter wielded a chisel.

Mary is making Roschach blots, puddling colours on the page, folding it in half, pressing it with the heel of her hand, then opening it to reveal a new creation. Flowers and faces spring from nowhere. Leaving them to dry, we make up narratives about their random being. There are many shades and thoughts of blue, azure, peacock, iris, cobalt, indigo, cerulean, hyacinth. The various aqua blues. Washing blue. The colour of woodsmoke, lead, or skim milk. Jugs of blue, which hold enormous nodding deep poppy reds.

Oil-on-canvas islands float on different blue levels, or they are outlets of the mainland, glimpsed in mirrors and in window-frames. Recurrent objects - smoothing-iron, basin, kettle, bowl - weigh against them in specific gravities of light and shade. There are different weights of paint, from impasto to the near-bare canvas, where the ground becomes light.

Inishfree: Inis Fraoich, Heather Island; fraoch corraigh, marsh andromeda; fraoch camógach, Mediterranean heather. Fraoch is also fierceness, fury, hunger. A local song, Bádaí na Scadán (The Herring Boats) commemorates a famous fishing tragedy. The razor blue of herring. Mackerel skies. The drifting island of an upturned boat.

The picture is never complete nor fully born, for each abandoned canvas suggests other strategies, in which the same elements can conduct a different narrative relationship, different modes of space and congruence. There are always other ways of seeing things, other forms of being.

Mary is in the back yard, painting. She has found a bit of an old melamine worktop (24" x 18") for the various junk in the shed: crocked bicycles, rusting tins of paint, a rock-solid half-bag of cement, a defunct shopping-trolley, plant-pots. She has washed the melamine in a muddy desert brown and has scribbled a trifoliate green tree on it. I ask her if it is finished, and she nods her head. Five minutes later she has wiped it clean.

Beyond this frame, or that, of these apparently hermetic pictures, lie suggestions of another world, in which artefacts and flowers are themselves. Within the frame, the painting tries to mediate with that world, where flowers are indifferent to us.

It would seem that all this is about time. Solids are revealed by shadows, but the time it took to paint: the flowers have rearranged themselves by then, and the artist's capture of them is a retrospective act. So it is with words as well. In these experiments with time, I recognise myself.