6/ Landscape Watercolours

The artist's regular visits to the Beara Peninsula revive his interest in watercolour landscapes. He explains: 'Ever since I became a painter some fifty years ago, excited by the very smell of oil paint, I've been equally drawn to watercolour, Quite apart from these small landscapes, I have painted very many more head images in watercolour than in oil. Watercolour has taught me much in regard to painting in oil. It has helped me to release myself ... both painter and viewer work which preoccupied are constricted by the known appearance and identity of the human individual. Watercolour somehow loosens the knot of identity, while landscape frees you of all such constriction. I do not, myself, believe in artistic creation. In art as in science, I believe in discovery. Discovery, you might say, is revelation through accident, and no art form provides more opportunity for accident than watercolour.' Yvonne Scott observes: 'The watercolour landscapes have a particular place in his oeuvre. These are primarily understood as personal rather than mainstream works. As he has explained: "these were always made to one side of the more problematic me, so that I have tended to think of them as a diversion, the exploration of a private avenue". The landscape paintings are, nonetheless, very significant. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, le Brocquy produced a series of works addressing locations in various parts of the Country, primarily Beara, Wicklow and Dublin. These are not the incidental painted sketches of a transient visitor, but considered responses to places he knows well, or whose experience has a special meaning for him ... The artist is clear about his exploration of the topography of landscape which he intensionally transforms from objective description to subjective response. This process, he explains, is not so much "creation" as "discovery" - the uncovering of the essence of a place, and its experience.' ... | CHRONOLOGY OF A LIFE IRISH LANDSCAPE

The artist's interest in watercolour landscapes originates in the 1940's with The Round O (Meath Tumulus (1942), The Dodder. The White House on the Fall (1943), The Twelve Bens, Connemara (1945), Slieve Mor, Dooagh, Achill (1946), Annamoe River, County. Wicklow (1947), Provence (morning) (1949), Snow landscape, Wiltshire (1949). The genre, however, is almost entirely abandoned over a thirty-five period until the emergence of Tuscany (1986; w743A), identified as a visual forerunner to the forthcoming Irish landscape series heralding an important body of work. Kate Robinson writes in the Sunday Tribune: 'Louis le Brocquy's collection of small landscapes shows how watercolour can be manipulated in the hands of a master. Through the abstractions of running paint and the dense mistiness of colour, the personality of Ireland is revealed'.