Patrick Collins HRHA (1911-1994)
Moonrise on the Lake
Oil on canvas, 65 x 92cm (25½ x 36¼'')
Signed

 

In Patrick Collins: A View on Painting, broadcast on RTÉ in 1985, Collins speaks of...

Patrick Collins HRHA (1911-1994)
Moonrise on the Lake
Oil on canvas, 65 x 92cm (25½ x 36¼'')
Signed

 

In Patrick Collins: A View on Painting, broadcast on RTÉ in 1985, Collins speaks of how 'The title is nearly always a clue to a picture and it's the only effort the artist can make to give you some literary statement that helps you with a picture. It's called something so therefore you look for something. It's called 'A Valley at Sunset' or 'The Lakes of Killarney', 'A Street Scene', 'Still Life'. All these things will help you look for this. But again there's the contradiction. If you just look for what the title suggests, you're going to miss the subtlety of the picture which goes beyond that.'

 

Moonrise on the Lake conjures up a romantic, lyrical image but, as Collins himself, suggests it goes beyond a rising moon and lakescape. Look for the lake, look for the moon and they are there but as Collins himself observes the painting goes beyond that. It can be admired for what it is and for what it suggests. Asked, in 1973, about being called an abstract expressionist Collins replied 'it's true in a way. When I'm into a picture, I'll always forget the subject . . . . because it's the whole flow that important'.

 

Moonrise on the Lake is both representational and abstract. What you see is what you get does not apply here. The more you engage with this work, the more rewarding it is. Peter Murray says 'The painting can mean different things to different people, a vagueness Collins encouraged; his deliberate use of indistinct forms, engulfed or surrounded by an almost tangible atmosphere, freed the art work from the specific and the everyday'.

 

This composition features a grey-blue lake at night and in the distance, white and pale yellow bands of light shine out against a darker background. But in Collins's work colour is never a single colour. His palette brilliantly combines different colours and in this instance soft brushstrokes create a quiet movement in the water. In the foreground the brighter, different shapes, the use of strong blacks and whites and the block of colour, with its yellow, greens and reddish-orange give the paining a fine power. Is this the moon's reflection? Is it the artist going beyond that and celebrating form and colour? It is both. 'You don't believe in the thing that you're painting, you believe in the thing behind what you're painting' said Collins in 1985

Opening a Patrick Collins Exhibition in Cork in 1972, poet John Montague spoke of Collins's work as 'a dialogue in colour, a mystical experience of light, effecting a bedreamer vision of paint'. Oil paint and canvas, '[t]he old materials', says Collins, 'are very simple. Your paint, your canvas - it hasn't begun to be exhausted.'

 

Collins always painted in artificial light but that never diminished the work. Moonrise on the Lake captures a wonderful, quiet energy. The moon's reflection glows bright, shines bright on a calm, muted lake.

In an Irish Times interview, 1973, he told Harriet Cooke: 'I don't think it matters a damn. A good play is never better because it is put on in the open air. Plein air, al fresco, it doesn't matter at all' adding that '[a]rt explains humanity; it's outside nature. It's a necessity, an impetus, a force.'

When Patrick Collins died, Aidan Dunne rightly recognised him as 'one of the finest Irish painters of the century and one of the select few to have contributed to an Irish artistic identity'.

 

Niall MacMonagle, February 2020

 

 

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