Imagining Eamon O’ Kane in his studio, the walls around him groan with the weight of paintings stacked against them. A computer purrs in the corner, he quietly and efficiently moves around the space tending to a variety of projects almost simultaneously, while a freshly executed layer of paint on a canvas is set to dry, he returns to the computer… another project begins.
Eamon O’ Kane
Living on automatic driveby Mike Fitzpatrick
Imagining Eamon O’ Kane in his studio, the walls around him groan with the weight of paintings stacked against them. A computer purrs in the corner, he quietly and efficiently moves around the space tending to a variety of projects almost simultaneously, while a freshly executed layer of paint on a canvas is set to dry, he returns to the computer… another project begins.
As one of the most prolific artists I have ever encountered, I feel free to speculate on and imagine his modus operandi. He works in many or any media. As well as his incredible energy in making work; Eamon has this amazing ability to engage successfully with a wide variety of processes and mediums from painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, to video and the various new technologies. Within this multitude of processes each is employed with specific conceptual awareness, for example his earlier huge drawings of cityscapes are epic depictions. Direct traditional drawings, derived from photomontages, which are delivered heroically in the style of the artist single-handedly capturing the city with a simple piece of charcoal. These are telling works, evocative, nostalgic, yet with a knowing interplay on our collective art-historical subconscious.
Eamon O’Kane comes from a family of artists in Donegal, the North-West of Ireland, an area known for its wild angry skies and natural untouched beauty, having very quickly moved through art school in Dublin and New York, also spending time in Europe. Now he is based in Bristol, England, where he combines college lecturing with his burgeoning art practice. His work documents his travels as he organically responds to the visual and perceptual stimuli of his changing environments.
Take SOAP for instance, one of his videos culled from popular culture of the American daytimeTV soap opera, within which, he gives a concise description of the grammar of TV drama clichés. He extracts tiny clips of selected soap operas, which show small movements, which have become shorthand of expression within these narrow narrative vehicles. By stacking up numerous examples of these vignettes he generates an awareness of the form of grammatical shorthand through which these dramas are constructed. In so doing he delivers tightly edited artworks that are funny and accurate deconstructions of the genre. The playfulness and lightness of touch mask the clarity of these works that probe the complex notions of ‘performance’ and ‘gender’ in our increasingly ‘real’ virtual communities that these characters and ourselves inhabit.
His paintings vary in scale from the postcard to the museum size; again these production decisions are driven by different concepts and rationales. The postcards appear to be just what they are … quick graphic responses to his travels, painting as a means of slowing the photographs down. These works also suggest a play on the original American artists traversing the plains. These individual miniature works becomes monumental by their massing in number. The whole mass of these images becomes much more important than their individual worth.
The ‘Sign Series’ that followed on from the postcard paintings also reflect on the phenomenon of modern travel and cultural tourism. The ‘Sign’ works investigate the growth of tourist attractions. By adding text panels under existing directional or informational signs he created a new interpretation of these objects. Likewise he has used re-positioning of found signs and the resultant work functioned as both site specific or as photo documentation. Using found signs, the added texts panel put forward the suggestion that even the use of a ‘sign’ itself creates a ‘thing’ to be looked at. In this manner the found ‘sign’ and its commentary text are joined in an uneasy self-reflexive engagement for the viewer to grapple with.
His recent paintings the ‘Ideal Studio’ series are large-scale oil paintings on canvas consisting of views of architectural interventions, some based on modified existing architecture and others that are fictional. These particular paintings where the man-made meets with nature, the intellectual artifice intersects with the ‘natural’ world, reflect a growing maturity in his work. These works further draw out O’Kane’s conceptual concerns considering these noble iconic architectural interventions from some of the world's leading architects including, Frank Lloyd Wright, Lacaton Vassal, Alvar Aalto and Elam & Bray.
In these meditations O'Kane appears to query ideas of space, connectivity and engagement with society and the environment that are suggested in the paintings. It also brings forth ideas of the aestheticized space, the artist removed, alone. As the Irish Times critic Aidan Dunne commented “ the remote, at times forbidding settings of these prototypical studios also raise the question of whether the artist is better placed in an ivory tower or in the midst of social space”. These forms of engagement concern and perplex him – he employs an act of visual description using the traditional artistic tools, the quasi direct drawing and painting approach with its lineage of apparent perceptual honesty and responsiveness wrapped in the non-sureness of artistic subjectivity side-by-side with the post-modern awareness of the complexity and compromised nature of visual representation.
Eamon inhabits this dichotomy of art practice with nonchalance; his manner of going forward is through making his own pounding regime of production an end in itself. He has even used his vast production skills as a self-reflexive joke in the Ani-mates – Die Bildermacher series where he created a series of cartoon-like characters who would appear at night in his studio and create artworks. This humorous intervention acts on one level as a semi-apologetic metaphor to joke about the concept of over production. Likewise the ‘ani-mates’ series allow Eamon to play with the concepts of the ‘original and unique work of the artist’ thus acknowledging the frailties of authorship. This work also signals his intention that he will not be constrained by any conceptual end games that limit his practice and remove a primary motivation - the joy of making. For Eamon, to work is to live; this strategy in turn develops and forms his language and philosophy. Onward!