George Campbell, RHA, RUA 1917 - 1979
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George Campbell, RHA. RUA (1917 - 1979) "Abstract" Mixed Media, 7" x 11"
In 1978, the year before his death, George Campbell travelled to Galway to co-ordinate an exhibition entitled Spain by Irish Artists. There was great significance attached to this event, summing up as it did the two major influences on the artist’s work : the west of Ireland and Spain. The landscape of the west of Ireland and the brío of the Spanish culture were his constant references.
Bred in Belfast, Campbell was, in fact, born in Arklow but his heart belonged to Spain. “Since my boyhood, Spain has had a special attraction for me and I always think it a strange sort of coincidence that the word for Spaniard in Spanish is ‘Celtebero’”.From his first experience of Spain in the winter of 1951 he felt – and some say he looked - like a native of the country. His volatile, restless character found resonance in the Spanish psyche. The Spanish people recognized his allegiance to them by appointing him a Commander with the Insignia and Privileges of the Merito Civile in 1978 and this year, twenty-five years after his death, a street in Málaga is to be renamed in his honour.
In the year which brought him great plaudits from the people of Spain he entrusted to celluloid his thoughts on his life and work by recording a three-part interview for B.B.C. Northern Ireland; its overall title was Triptych, the individual programmes being Spain, Ireland and Painting. Rather curiously, Painting he states that, for him at least, “It’s not possible to talk about art”.Words,he felt, were redundant when it came to painting. Although regarded as a great raconteur, he rarely talked about his art. He was
not given to in-depth analysis of his work. Painting, for him, was a given; he did not choose to paint, he was the paint’s medium. It was a process of sublimation whereby all his day-to-day experiences would be stockpiled and then released in a cathartic burst of creativity. “Open the door and let the wind carry it”, as he said to camera. He likened himself to a sponge, constantly soaking up influences and images and storing them up for future compositions as he almost invariably painted from memory.
In his earlier work he uses the line as language. In his hands it is a graceful, indeed sensual, form of communication. He speaks of line the way an author would speak of his characters : “incised lines, rough lines, nervous lines, architectural lines, depending on what I expect them to do for me”. George’s line snakes back through history to the Gothic, the Urnes and the Celtic. He developed beyond this to express himself through colour and form. Very much an autodidact, a practiser of his own techniques and theories, he was influenced by Cubism, at least at a pictorial level. He was not so much influenced by the thinking of, say, Picasso and Braque as by the fruits of their thinking. Late in life in Triptych : Painting he quoted George Braques “Art is there to extend your approach, not to make you feel comfortable and smug”. The faceted planes and interlocking shapes of, say, Bicycles, is a direct nod to Cubism. The Russian sculptor, Ossip Zadkine, encouraged George towards abstraction by stressing the musical and spiritual qualities of paint. “I like your controlled complexities”, he said. George absorbed this and reproduced it twenty-five years later in his gun-metal grey/blue Irish seas. Nothing was ever lost with George; everything went into his “ rusty archive”.
Music was vitally important to Campbell, both in terms of his life and his work. His widow Madge recalls that as a young man working in the Belfast offices of Short & Harland he was noted for his whistling, favouring Schubert particularly. His great ambition was to be the conductor of an orchestra. Later in life he often depicted orchestras in his work. In an Irish Times interview in 1964 he said : “I was in Spain at the heart of the very best flamenco and it started to run parallel with my painting.” He was an accomplished flamenco guitar-player and, of course, often featured music-making in his work. He played music whilst painting. Again, it is the practical knowledge of music which informs his painting rather than the theoretical ; the playing rather than the listening. He described his work in terms of musicality : “I start out by picking everything out with one finger on a piano, build it up gradually, and hope that finally I’ll have an orchestra going.” In Triptych : Spain he describes himself as a “foreigner intrigued by flamenco” and talks movingly of this living voice of the people, its rhythm and mood, its “being there”. He sees humour in the saddest flamenco and tragedy in the most humorous. He quotes a flamenco lyricist’s words : “I tell my sorrows singing because to sing is to cry. I tell my joys dancing because to dance is to laugh.” Like Antonio Varga, the blind guitarist whom he famously depicted, George never analyses, he just accepts. This we see translated to his paintings: “the hens, the dogs, the cats, the people, the children, the washing”; all is there, nothing is filtered out.
George’s first exposure to traditional Spanish gypsy dancing was out of context in that he saw the Carmen Amaya troupe at London’s Princess Theatre in the late 1940s several years before his first visit to Spain in 1951. He was transfixed by the bright colours of the clothing offset against the dark gyspy skin tones. It was a theme which he often revisited in his work. In a 1971 B.B.C.Northern Ireland interview on Sunday Gallery he spoke of his first impressions of Spain : “Spain of the ethereal light and the mysterious nights, its introverted extroverted people, its song and dance, its rugged and lace shapes and textures hard wrought by thousands of years.” He never gives us a detailed rendition of Spain; he captures its essence. Shapes and patterns are more important than detail. “There are”, he said in an article in The Artist, “underlying abstractions in nature if you consciously look for them and once you begin to recognise them you will see them everywhere.” He only went part of the way towards abstraction feeling that “an abstract must be rich in content. It must have roots no matter how far these roots go. It must have meaning. I am bored by a few simple shapes that convey nothing to me.”
Bred in Belfast, Campbell was, in fact, born in Arklow but his heart belonged to Spain. “Since my boyhood, Spain has had a special attraction for me and I always think it a strange sort of coincidence that the word for Spaniard in Spanish is ‘Celtebero’”.From his first experience of Spain in the winter of 1951 he felt – and some say he looked - like a native of the country. His volatile, restless character found resonance in the Spanish psyche. The Spanish people recognized his allegiance to them by appointing him a Commander with the Insignia and Privileges of the Merito Civile in 1978 and this year, twenty-five years after his death, a street in Málaga is to be renamed in his honour.
In the year which brought him great plaudits from the people of Spain he entrusted to celluloid his thoughts on his life and work by recording a three-part interview for B.B.C. Northern Ireland; its overall title was Triptych, the individual programmes being Spain, Ireland and Painting. Rather curiously, Painting he states that, for him at least, “It’s not possible to talk about art”.Words,he felt, were redundant when it came to painting. Although regarded as a great raconteur, he rarely talked about his art. He was
not given to in-depth analysis of his work. Painting, for him, was a given; he did not choose to paint, he was the paint’s medium. It was a process of sublimation whereby all his day-to-day experiences would be stockpiled and then released in a cathartic burst of creativity. “Open the door and let the wind carry it”, as he said to camera. He likened himself to a sponge, constantly soaking up influences and images and storing them up for future compositions as he almost invariably painted from memory.
In his earlier work he uses the line as language. In his hands it is a graceful, indeed sensual, form of communication. He speaks of line the way an author would speak of his characters : “incised lines, rough lines, nervous lines, architectural lines, depending on what I expect them to do for me”. George’s line snakes back through history to the Gothic, the Urnes and the Celtic. He developed beyond this to express himself through colour and form. Very much an autodidact, a practiser of his own techniques and theories, he was influenced by Cubism, at least at a pictorial level. He was not so much influenced by the thinking of, say, Picasso and Braque as by the fruits of their thinking. Late in life in Triptych : Painting he quoted George Braques “Art is there to extend your approach, not to make you feel comfortable and smug”. The faceted planes and interlocking shapes of, say, Bicycles, is a direct nod to Cubism. The Russian sculptor, Ossip Zadkine, encouraged George towards abstraction by stressing the musical and spiritual qualities of paint. “I like your controlled complexities”, he said. George absorbed this and reproduced it twenty-five years later in his gun-metal grey/blue Irish seas. Nothing was ever lost with George; everything went into his “ rusty archive”.
Music was vitally important to Campbell, both in terms of his life and his work. His widow Madge recalls that as a young man working in the Belfast offices of Short & Harland he was noted for his whistling, favouring Schubert particularly. His great ambition was to be the conductor of an orchestra. Later in life he often depicted orchestras in his work. In an Irish Times interview in 1964 he said : “I was in Spain at the heart of the very best flamenco and it started to run parallel with my painting.” He was an accomplished flamenco guitar-player and, of course, often featured music-making in his work. He played music whilst painting. Again, it is the practical knowledge of music which informs his painting rather than the theoretical ; the playing rather than the listening. He described his work in terms of musicality : “I start out by picking everything out with one finger on a piano, build it up gradually, and hope that finally I’ll have an orchestra going.” In Triptych : Spain he describes himself as a “foreigner intrigued by flamenco” and talks movingly of this living voice of the people, its rhythm and mood, its “being there”. He sees humour in the saddest flamenco and tragedy in the most humorous. He quotes a flamenco lyricist’s words : “I tell my sorrows singing because to sing is to cry. I tell my joys dancing because to dance is to laugh.” Like Antonio Varga, the blind guitarist whom he famously depicted, George never analyses, he just accepts. This we see translated to his paintings: “the hens, the dogs, the cats, the people, the children, the washing”; all is there, nothing is filtered out.
George’s first exposure to traditional Spanish gypsy dancing was out of context in that he saw the Carmen Amaya troupe at London’s Princess Theatre in the late 1940s several years before his first visit to Spain in 1951. He was transfixed by the bright colours of the clothing offset against the dark gyspy skin tones. It was a theme which he often revisited in his work. In a 1971 B.B.C.Northern Ireland interview on Sunday Gallery he spoke of his first impressions of Spain : “Spain of the ethereal light and the mysterious nights, its introverted extroverted people, its song and dance, its rugged and lace shapes and textures hard wrought by thousands of years.” He never gives us a detailed rendition of Spain; he captures its essence. Shapes and patterns are more important than detail. “There are”, he said in an article in The Artist, “underlying abstractions in nature if you consciously look for them and once you begin to recognise them you will see them everywhere.” He only went part of the way towards abstraction feeling that “an abstract must be rich in content. It must have roots no matter how far these roots go. It must have meaning. I am bored by a few simple shapes that convey nothing to me.”
George Campbell, RHA, RUA (1917 - 1979) "Still Life with Flowers" Oil on board, 10" x 12"
George required a rhythm in painting as in everything else; even his early Irish landscapes display his fascination with underlying patterns and rhythms. Rocks and mountains are seen in planes of colour rather than realistically. He paints specific locations but they are analysed and reassembled, almost tessellated. The landscape is broken down and then represented. He was able to look at a landscape and reproduce it with all the unimportant elements eliminated. It was on the natural phenomena of the west of Ireland that Campbell honed his craft. The bleak desolate terrain of the west entranced him; the “Connemara-tweed landscapes, the Donegal-tweed landscapes”, the warp and weft of the landscape. In using paint intuitively he was able to recreate the sharp contrast between the rough- textured areas of rock and stonework and the smoother areas of sky and water. In an early interview he talks of getting “great delight in handling paint from the feel of it, the look of it. I got a tremendous kick from being able to take a palette knife and swish the paint onto the canvas, from seeing colours and textures emerge that I had never seen before.” Again in Triptych : Ireland he speaks of “blacks and browns against pinks and yellows that leap at you from the painting”. He loved dark tones and evening light. In the west of Ireland he painted by paraffin-lamp; in Spain he painted mostly at night by naked bulb. He felt that the cross influences of all the shadows made for an interesting painting.
People working with nature were his preferred subject, both in the Irish and the Spanish context. “I only paint”, he said, “people whom I know very well. I know guitar players. I know men who dig in fields. I know tinkers and gypsies. I don’t ever try to step out of what I know best.” He liked to depict figures absorbed in work and unaware of the world around them; they are frozen in that moment, with that particular gesture and that particular stance. He painted “generally tragic people, the isolated guitar player, the isolated person digging in a field but both of them human beings completely in their context.” He was concerned to convey the character and inner feelings of his subjects. George was an avid collector of small figurines, mainly of African origin, which inspired him to create his series of paintings entitled Warriors. These he described as “standing figures all dressed up with no place to go, passed over by civilization, subdued by the machine-gun or takeover bids or what have you. African warriors, Celtic warriors, standing just having their being, their bewildered, dignified being, all dressed up Beckett figures, a little like us, I feel.” There is a strong sense of waiting in many of George’s works: fishermen, farmers, musicians, dancers, picadors all are waiting for their entrance.
The year 1951 marked a watershed in George’s life. He spent the summer on Inishlacken, a tiny island off the west coast of Ireland and the winter in Pedregalejo, Málaga. In 1952 he showed at the R.H.A. Spanish Market, Net Menders, Catalonia and Harbour, Catalonia. From henceforth there was a decided Hispano – Hibernian cast to his work. He felt that there were many similarities between the peoples and cultures of the two countries.For half the year he painted the west of Ireland with its reeds and rocks peopled by Irish farmers and musicians; for the remaining half he depicted Malagueño beaches and streets peopled by picadors, gypsies and guitarists. In Dublin his circle consisted of artists, writers and journalists and centred around Mulligan’s pub whilst in Málaga it was La Buena Sombra which resounded to the artistic duels during their sessions of copas. In 1978 he posed for a photograph which perfectly sums up his love of the two countries through his love of music; he rests his hand on a Flamenco guitar whilst sporting a tie which depicts the Irish harp. It is tempting to see him as an amalgam of those two twentieth-century icons, James Joyce and Pablo Picasso. Like his fellow Irishman, Guinness in hand, he is celtic, obsessive, educated and cultured whilst under Mediterranean light, Moscatel in copa, he is atheistic, confused yet dominant. Like them he observed and studied the human condition. Like theirs Campbell’s is not an easy language; the viewer must contemplate and consider the piece; with familiarity comes comprehension.
George was proud of having formulated his own discipline and techniques. He enjoyed the fact that his work was scattered and that the critics commented on the fact that his shows looked like group exhibitions. “Group exhibition on two legs!”, he proudly declares in Triptych : Painting . He rejoices in the fact that everything impinges on him. He boasts of his friend, James McAuley, saying : “You’re such a bloody Celt. You cannot leave anything alone. You want to go on to the edge.” He admits to “painting diarrhoea” and a craving for more textures and more images. “I need my head hoovered out”, he said just weeks before his death; he was teeming with ideas. In this programme he declares his intention to do even more abstract paintings. George revelled in his own set of symbols and vocabulary. He felt that in terms of painting words have no meaning and he described the world of art criticism as a “big garden full of weeds and I’m looking for a daffodil”.In a 1974 interview in Art About Ireland he made his feelings very clear : “I feel that the aura of ‘Inner Sanctum’ and intellectualism in Art should be broken down – it’s visual – and that’s that”. Almost his final cri de coeur was to the galleries; he wanted them to say loudly and clearly “ Come in and extend your ideas” leaving him to say “Good Morning” in paint.
Sile Connaughton Deeny