George Campbell RHA (1917-1979) Connemara Island Man Oil on board, 61 x 50.4cm, (24 x 19.75'') Signed, inscribed verso Provenance: Tom Caldwell Gallery label verso The Islander depicted is one of...

George Campbell RHA (1917-1979) Connemara Island Man Oil on board, 61 x 50.4cm, (24 x 19.75'') Signed, inscribed verso Provenance: Tom Caldwell Gallery label verso The Islander depicted is one of those lantern jawed raw boned men so typical of Connemara, the Islands and from the Maam Valley, rendered by the artist through a prism of Cubist hue and using the Cubist playing card system as a construct, which like Mainie Jellett, Evie Hone and Norah McGuinness he adapted to his own painting needs. This figure is of a mountainy man well used to peering into harsh winds, and using his stick which is a Sheppard's crook for support and gathering in recalcitrant sheep off a mountain, it is a powerful work indeed. Born in Arklow, Co.Wicklow to a Belfast mother, Gretta Bowen, who was herself a painter in the Na?ve tradition he grew up in Northern Ireland and began exhibiting in Belfast in 1941. By 1944 he was exhibiting alongside his lifelong friends Gerard Dillon and James McIntyre and later with Arthur Armstrong. A cubist by choice he saw in Cubism a way of describing things and people in nature which suited his decorative pictorial purposes. Gerard Dillon adapted a more Faux Na?ve approach and Arthur Armstrong a more atmospheric form of picture marking. What they all had in common technically was their ability to use forms of synthetic cubism and mould it to their picture making needs. Norah McGuinness another Northern artist also used forms of synthetic cubism for many of her middle period and later works in a more frenchified way. She took the playing card idea of cubism and used it in a deliberately one dimensional way modified by strong colour which came to her probably naturally but amplified by her experience of Stained Glass through her early teacher Harry Clark; Campbell on the other hand took the idea of stained glass and mosaic tesserae to give his compositions the same playing card idea derived from Cubism but with scumbled colour as might be found in painted glass he developed the forms, human and landscape, to give a sense of recession not through skewed perspective like McGuinness but through the sensibilit? of colour in the form. The human figure as described by Campbell is also a series of planes and arcs partly described as in the cut line for stained glass but which also gives him the opportunity to create a sense of modelling without resorting to academic processes of rendering, rather relying instead on a vigorous application of his colour palette to the subject. In the Spring and Summer of 1951 Campbell, Armstrong, Dillon and McIntyre stayed in a cottage on the Island of Inishlacken off Roundstone in Connemara and over the next 17 years made many return visits to the area as they had jointly but differently found a solution to their problems of pictorial resolution especially in the matter of the foreground. Campbell found that the rock and bog formations could be adapted to his compositional purposes, and in that context the large mountainy men of Connemara suited his work, long limbed bodies, fleshless almost with large heads and hands a feature which also figures in the works by his friend the artist Maurice MacGonigal and earlier by Jack B.Yeats. The raw-boned Connemara Men and ample women were ideal for a painter of cubist inclinations. Also the boggy formations and its colour suited Campbell's Spanish orientated palette, so that he was at home in either landscape. Ciar?n MacGonigalNovember 2006.

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