Martin Gale and Charles Tyrrell are both painters, though their work couldn’t be more different: Gale is known for his depictions of human and animal figures in highly detailed landscapes, while Tyrrell has remained firmly rooted in abstraction throughout his career. Their work will be on view this month and next in a joint exhibition called In Parallel at the Sarah Walker Gallery in Castletownbere, Co Cork.
Gale lives in Co Kildare and Tyrrell in Allihies on the Beara Peninsula in West Cork, but the two have been close friends since they met at the National Gallery of Art and Design in 1968. Both recall that at first NCAD was fairly peaceful. For two years they attended the practical workshops required of Foundation students before they could move on to the traditional three-year School of Painting programme.
“It would have been the same kind of education that was taught in France and England, but a century earlier,” says Tyrrell. “It was figurative. You worked from the ancient statue. You started at the feet and worked your way up to the head. You didn’t get to the study hall until the third year.”
The students, particularly those who had become familiar with contemporary art, soon grew tired of this style of teaching. Gale recalls being drawn to the pop art he had seen in London, while Tyrrell was fascinated by the abstract expressionism he had encountered while working in Boston during the summers.
“At the end of our second year, there was a kind of revolution,” Gale says. To put it mildly, for the first time in NCAD’s history, students refused to engage with the curriculum.
“There were protests and sit-ins. We were sleeping at the university and all that. The students were divided into three sections: those who went to classes; those who were very involved in politics; and those who, like me and Charlie, went to all the meetings and supported the revolt, but were also very interested in getting on with the work.”
The authorities were hesitant about how to react. So for the last three years of the university, the students were virtually left to their own devices. “We took over the entire gallery space at the university,” says Tyrrell. “Tutors rarely came in. You could say there was a certain degree of anarchy, but very good work was being done.”
Tyrrell had his first exhibition at the Project Arts Centre before he had even graduated. “NCAD didn’t want to publish my paintings because, technically, any work done by a student is actually the property of the university. This was being pushed on me, but we were all too arrogant to consider or care about it. A large team of us transported my entire exhibition of paintings – this series of canvases – from NCAD to the gallery on South King St.”
Gale had a joint exhibition with another contemporary artist, Johnny Davidson, at the Davis Gallery in 1972. “Interestingly, the NCAD painting professor, John Kelly, attended the opening. I think it was the first time he had seen our work.”
The three of them, newly graduated, submitted their work to the annual Irish Living Art Exhibition. “I was rejected the first year,” says Gale. “But I was accepted the following year, when Johnny Davidson won first prize. That summer I was working in a pea factory in Northamptonshire and I heard that two of my paintings had been sold. One sold for sixty pounds and the other for forty. And that was it; I gave up the peas for the painting.”
Tyrrell stayed in Dublin for about ten years after graduating, before moving to Allihies, while Gale moved to County Wicklow almost immediately. He later moved to County Kildare, where he has been based for many years.
As an artist, he has always been inspired by the natural world, but to label his paintings “landscapes” would be to miss his intentions. “I don’t make landscapes,” he says. “The landscape is simply the place where the paintings take place. It is the starting point, but not the subject matter. Much of what is in my paintings is invented.”
Several of his new paintings feature anxious birds flying through copses of trees. “That idea started with a book of Johnny Cash poetry,” he says. “One poem in the book is called The Dogs Are in the Woods, and the next line says, ‘And the hunting seems good. ’ So it’s not Wordsworth, you know, but the title stuck in my head. There are no dogs in the painting, but there are all these frightened birds, flying in one direction. We don’t know why, but for some reason they’ve become frightened.”
“When I was working on that painting, just after Christmas, there was a lot of talk on the news about refugees fleeing, that was in the air at the time.”
Despite living between the mountains and the sea in Allihies, Tyrrell has never been 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 minimalist, layers and layers of paint building 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. A square here, one there, two there. And then, really, it’s just a matter of putting them all together into a unified whole. If these paintings are anything to go by, it’s the awkward adaptation that has to take place, the twists and turns to put things together. They’ve ended up being very interesting and elegant. There’s a three-dimensional element to them, but that’s a complete byproduct. I have no control over that.”
After all these years, neither of the two artists has ever regretted their professional choice or their approach to painting. But surely, at some point, both have been tempted to try the other's technique.
“No,” says Tyrrell. “Never. Although I do remember sitting down to draw a landscape once; I ended up writing ‘Sky’ at the top of the page and ‘Grass’ below. I just don’t do renderings.”
Has Gale ever seen Tyrrell’s work and thought, “I could do that”? “Or could a five-year-old do that?” she laughs. “No, I have great respect for what Charlie does, but he has followed his own path as an artist and I have followed mine. That’s why the name of the exhibition, In Parallel, is so appropriate.”
- In parallel: Martin Gale and Charles Tyrrell continues at Sarah Walker Gallery, Castletownbere until 17 September
- More information: www.sarahwalkergallery.com