Sunday Independent – Sunday 15 December 2024 – Niall MacMonagle
Art: What Lies Beneath Hare in the headlights as a riot of stars bedazzle
Niall NaessensMorris Minor 1300 and Mountain Hare
Niall Naessens was six when the new modern church in Ballyroan opened. “The stations of the cross were huge stained-glass windows, the crucifix with its red Christ was by Imogen Stuart and there were two massive murals by Seán Keating, who lived up the road.”
For the budding artist, it was a moment of inspiration – divine inspiration.
The Naessens were “a bit of a drawing family, like you get music families”. His father taught engineering drawing in Kevin Street, “there were always big sheets of cartridge paper and drawing things at home for us”, and his father “brought us to night classes in Dún Laoghaire School of Art, like other fathers brought their lads to football”.
At Templeogue College, Naessens went to Peter Weafer’s art room “to avoid PE and other subjects I didn’t enjoy”.
Weafer encouraged him “but art was not part of the ethos of the school”. It was “the only subject I worked hard at”, though “the careers guidance priest thought it irresponsible and probably immoral of me to apply to NCAD”.
But go he did, to study visual communications, he graduated and then, at the Graphic Studio Dublin, “James McCreary taught me how to make etchings and organised work for me there”.
At the age of 50, Naessens did an MFA. His subject matter is “about wilderness or the sea”.
Based in west Kerry, where the family moved with four small children 20 years ago, his “work is both tangibly and metaphysically at the edge of the world. Ar imeall an iontais – the edge of marvellous – is how [poet] Cathal Ó Searcaigh described my recent work.”
Naessens identifies with Romanticism and Edmund Burke’s notion of the sublime – “my ambition is to articulate wonder”.
Printmaking, he admits, is labour intensive. “You have to think ahead, like in chess.” And he acknowledges his work is becoming more colourful.
“In coloured etching, you’re drawing on three or four plates to make a single image. The drawings are inside out and back to front. You proof, modify and rework the various plates and colours until they’re doing something you want.”
This digital drawing inkjet print on bamboo paper, Morris Minor 1300 and Mountain Hare, is one of a series of “nocturnes with cars”. Cars give “focus and narrative” and “the scene is Lios na Caolbhaí, where I live, but things have been moved around”.
The driver of the Morris Minor is “oblivious to witnessing our position in the cosmos” but Naessens likes the “iconic shape” of the car, even though “I have never seen one around here. The event is a fiction. It is observed, remembered, imagined and reinvented. The colours are delivered intense, the stars are bold so as to be legible.”
And the hare? That’s adopted from Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed, The Great Western Railway“
Turner’s hare runs ahead of the train with no apparent means of escape. The hare for me is an encounter with the wild – for Turner, a metaphor for the impact of the industrial revolution on the natural world.”
It’s a beautiful, romantic scene – a starry, starry night. “Compared to the city, it’s very dark in west Kerry, and in November on a clear night the sky is an astonishing riot of stars.
”The mountains, the twinkling distant house lights, the headlights, the turquoise-blue sea are all magically and gorgeously brought alive. Up Kerry.
Irish Art Review Winter 2017 – Volume 34. David Lilburn
Good Morning Mister Turner – Niall Naessens National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin
Good Morning Mr Turner
Separated by time, but united in their inspiration, Niall Naessens shows his work at this season’s annual display of the Turner Collection, reports David Lilburn.
Affirming the view that the best readings of art are art, and that art is also art criticism, the National Gallery of Ireland, to compliment the next annual display of the Henry Vaughan Bequest of works by Joseph Mallord William Turner in January 2018, has invited Irish master printmaker Niall Naessens to mount an exhibition. Showing no evidence of being overshadowed by his great exemplar, Naessens sets out to welcome and engage with his hero in his exhibition Good Morning Mr Turner. ‘My work for this show’ he writes ‘is an homage to Turner. As an artist who works in the realm of landscape imagery I constantly revisit Turner’s work and take note each time I do, he is the measure, the standard.’ A theme running through the show is that of conversation; conversations between two artists and between an artist and the landscape. With Brandon Head as a backdrop, Naessens and Turner can be seen conversing in the etching ‘Artists Discussing Burkes Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of Sublime and Beautiful’, referring to a treatise so influential to Turner and the Romantic movement (Fig 3). In many of the images, an artist, probably Mr Turner, possibly Mr Naessens – book under his arm, wearing a distinctive hat – prowls through the landscapes on the lookout for images and experiences.
In his exhibition there are many enjoyable ‘quotes’ and references to works by Turner, for example, the figure of Napoleon standing on a local Kerry beach before a blood red morning sky in ‘Figures from a History Painting’ and the octagonal image space in Artist Observing Dawn, Sunrise over Caherconree, (Fig 1). Both bring to mind Turner’s War. The Exile and the Rock Limpit (Tate Britain).
Many artists who have developed a distinctive personal ‘voice’, started off making work ‘after’ their hero before ending up becoming more like themselves. In his show Naessens does not make ‘Turners’, he makes ‘Naessenses’. The standard curatorial device of juxtaposition of these two exhibitions highlights just how different the two bodies of work are: in technique, in imagery, in temperament – unsurprisingly as the artists are from different places and from a different time.
But it also underlines a significant similarity – the works are landscapes which are imbued with a sense of presence, and in describing a view or an event express the experience of ‘being there’.
Naessens’ exhibition comprises drawings, coloured etchings and a charming ‘artist’s book’ or ‘box set’ of thirteen small etchings entitled Good Morning Mr Turner with the subtitle Indeed Sublime, a reference to Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry. The coloured etchings are made by printing up to four plates, each containing drawn elements, in different colours in layers on the one piece of paper and then through a labour intensive process, persistently modifying the plates and proofing, over a period of time (days, weeks, even months) until the final resonant image is eventually brought into being.
The large airy drawings in the show are built up in a manner that is informed by the rigorous processes of printmaking: ruled horizontal graphite lines of varying weights, are overlaid with a layer of translucent etching ink and then over painted in gouache.
In the work Naessens employs a number of artistic devices and constraints; all the images are in a square format, viewpoints are stretched, scale is distorted, props added and moved around and he frequently uses events or marks representing for example rain, vegetation or insects and apertures of one sort or another in the foreground to interrupt and frame the scene.
To make a landscape it is important to continually re-look at the landscape and Naessens brings an impressive battery of
THE WORKS ARE LANDSCAPES WHICH ARE IMBUED WITH A SENSE OF PRESENCE, AND IN DESCRIBING A VIEW OR AN EVENT EXPRESS THE EXPERIENCE OF ‘BEING THERE’
stored information and skill to the task: drawings, photographs, memory, experience, spatial sensitivity, invention, a wariness of the literal. Simply looking out the window and assimilating what is there (he lives with his family in Lios na Caolbhai on the slopes of Mount Brandon, facing east) can contribute to the final composition and atmosphere of the work. He is concerned to avoid instant ‘snapshot’ souvenir images and as a result of his individual, but patient practice, he succeeds. His images resonate with a sense of space and time and light.
In the end, the making of memorable images comes down to the individual artist’s unique way of looking, seeing and engaging with the world. Like Turner, who was obsessed with his work being kept and seen together, the better to validate his unique experience, Niall Naessens has created a coherent body of work; pictures that compliment each other, can be cross-referenced and which, when seen together, gain in meaning, and bear witness to his practice as an artist printmaker.
Niall Naessens ‘ Good Morning Mr Turner’ NGI, Dublin 1-31 January 2018.
David Lilburn is an artist, printmaker, designer and occasional publisher living in Limerick.
Sunday Times January 21 2018 – Cristin Leach
Art: Good Morning Mister Turner
This year the annual Turner outing at the National Gallery of Ireland is enlivened by the inspired pairing of the 19th-century watercolours with new works on paper by Irish master printmaker Niall Naessens. In this context, unexpected Turners shine, including The Fall of the River Velino near Terni, in which two figures are dwarfed by an Italian landscape of waterfall and steep crags. Sunset over Petworth Park and Ostend Harbour chime with the colours in Naessens’s vibrant etchings. Naessens borrows mood and feeling from Turner and applies them to depictions of landscape in his own style and location, such as Brandon on the West Kerry coast. He also brings humour to his Turner-mode depictions of an artist figure enthralled by nature. The show includes large-scale drawings, the standouts being Caherconree Snow Covered and a Shower of Hail, and Brandon Ridge, Landscape with Hares and Crows. Both artists capture a sense of contented aloneness outdoors, in ever-changing weather and shifting light. There’s one week left to catch this uplifting meeting of minds, two centuries apart. National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin.
The Gloss Magazine January 17, 2018. Penny McCormick
Artistic License with Niall Naessens Get to know artist NIALL NAESSENS …
The annual exhibition of Turner watercolours at the National Gallery of Ireland this year brings together the Gallery’s Vaughan bequest of 31 watercolours and a series of etchings and drawings by Niall Naessens. The exhibition includes elements that have featured in Naessens work for some time – a focus on line, framing devices and using multiple print techniques in one plate. Naessens also keeps his focus local – he lives and works from his studio in Kerry, overlooking Brandon Bay.
How did your participation in the annual Turner exhibition come about?
I approached Anne Hodge, curator of prints and drawings, four years ago with the idea of making work to complement the January Turner event at the National Gallery of Ireland. Anne liked the idea and worked on it. Good Morning Mister Turner was a working title but as the work developed it became more appropriate. Dawn permeated much of my new work. The figure of an artist appears in some of the works suggesting an encounter with Turner over the centuries through our work.
What did you learn about Turner in the process of this collaboration?
Turner is a master of light and space. The way he manipulates light creates magic in his work. When he paints he is working with light. In his late works he has not become vague or abstract, he has just dispensed with the peripheries to light. Look at his Venice watercolours in the Vaughan Bequest to see what I mean.
How long did it take to compile this exhibition?
I had done some preliminary work in 2016 drawings and notes but all the work in the show was made in 2017. The first couple of works took a long time and there were a few casualties but then it took its own course and momentum.
Who or what was a formative influence on your creative development?
Some people are from musical families. In our house my father encouraged drawing. I was more interested in drawing than design when I studied graphics in the eighties. My drawing teacher, the artist, Roger Shackleton was a big influence. I spent more time in his life room than the studio learning how to look as Roger put it. I am a draughtsman and drawing is fundamental to the art I make. James Mc Creary taught me how to make etchings at the graphic Studio Dublin. I worked as technician and printer there for many years with the studio’s many visiting artists, a chance to observe the nuances of how they constructed their work.
You have said in the past you are not a conventional landscape artist, yet it has an impact on your work.
I have become interested in how we are part of the landscape. Living in a fairly remote place you notice weather, tides, the phases of the moon. These days you can see Orion, Jupiter and Mars before dawn and also see how several ice ages whittled down the sandstone mountains over millions of years when the sun rises. The ocean never looks the same. The landscape humbles us. It will be still here when we are gone.
Do you draw outside?
I draw outside far less than I used to. I still use drawings I made outside years ago as references but now use many sources including photography and some appropriated (stolen) references. I often stick my head out the door of the studio to check things. I am inventing things now, merging places with events in my work. I try to suggest there are events before and after the image I present. I do not try to make definitive views of West Kerry but rather use the elements of my environment to create a kind of narrative.
What are you currently working on?
I am currently working on editioning the work in the show, which is an arduous task. I am thinking about the work I am going to make afterwards. Work begets work. For me the measure of a body of work is the amount of ideas it creates for subsequent work. Good Morning Mister Turner has opened up a lot of new ideas. My intention is that this show is a beginning.
Need to know: Good Morning Mister Turner – Niall Naessens and JMW Turner is on at the National Gallery of Ireland until January 31. Free admission; www.nationalgallery.ie.
L12121 Picture Panoply – Niall Naessens Graphic Studio Gallery, Dublin **** As a printmaker, Niall Naessens is an exemplary technician. That can be a bad thing. It is an occupational hazard among printmakers that obsessive attention to technique can stifle or corral creativity. But Naessens seems to be aware of that, and has always been at pains to look outwards, beyond the confines of the well-ordered print studio with its ironclad routine. Never more so than since he moved to rural Co Kerry, looking over the sea. L12121 is, apparently, the code for the Lios na Caolbhaí Road near Brandon, where he lives and works. Not that he has embraced disorder. He is a classicist. That is, he is one of those artists who takes on the unruly chaos of the world and makes an orderly, illuminating and beautiful representation of it, and the pleasure we take from his work stems from that process and the abilities that go into it. His use of line is superb, and his penchant for heightened or idiosyncratic colour, which might give you pause, is actually pretty sound. The etchings and monoprint/drawings (in other words, each is unique) in the show make up an exploration of his immediate environment, from inside to out, and close-up details – such as moths against the window – to distant vistas. He excels at conveying the layering of phenomena and vision, and stillness and movement are nicely counterpointed. In daily life, there’s lots of movement built into what we see, and he manages to catch that incredibly well: leaves, sycamore seeds and litter scattering across a landscape, the acrobatics of swallows, a shower of hail flung by the wind. He’s equally good on stillness, when it comes to the night sky, for example, as in the superb Ursa Major. Until March 28th, graphicstudiodublin.com
