Eilieen Hogan
Chelsea Physic Garden 2, 8 September 2016.
It’s a sprinkler, an embodiment of summer, spraying bright water over a field, and the image of it seems to capture nearly everything about it — the velocity of the machine, the sparkle of the water in the sun, the heat that’s already turning some of it to mist. It would be an exemplary photograph, but it’s more than that. It’s a painting, and the exacting image is rendered, it turns out, using the kind of forceful, painterly brush strokes more and more in abstract, experimental art. The artist, Eileen Hogan, captures the exact speed of water out of a sprinkler by ceding some control, and showing us the speed of paint itself.
Chelsea Physic Garden 2 is just one of a series of paintings and sketches by acclaimed artist Eileen Hogan, now on view at the Yale Center for British Art through Aug. 11. The museum has given over a substantial part of the second floor to her work, and the longer you take with it, the easier it is to see why. Hogan’s marriage of realistic images and more experimental techniques mark her not only as a painter of extreme technical ability, but quiet yet profound emotional depth.
Plane Trees.
Perhaps as it should, it begins with Hogan’s eye, sharply observant and seemingly only becoming more so with each passing year. Her rendering of plane trees in London’s garden’s is dazzling. The mix of sun and shade and the peeling of the bark intermingle, to the point that they seem part of the same process. The attention to detail is borne out in Hogan’s thoughts about the trees themselves: the bark flaking off, she tells us in an accompanying film about her process, “that’s a way of getting rid of the pollution … people have described them as London’s lungs.”
A good deal of the exhibit is taken up by paintings of gardens, which — I know — sounds unexciting. But Hogan shows us the life in the subject by bringing in so much of her own. It turns out that, to create her paintings, she didn’t just paint from nature, or from photographs; she visited the gardens again and again, in different seasons, and wasn’t drawn simply to the prettiest ones, or the most complicated. One grabbed her attention because it was a play where people played soccer. In another, she said, “I was lucky enough to get some very bad weather — fog and mist.” She was drawn to Chelsea Physic because it was a “working garden,” to another spot because it was a “community garden.” She also turned her eye to a neglected Jewish cemetery in London behind a wall high enough that she had to stand on a ladder to get a good look at it.
Ian Hamilton Finlay.
She was also drawn to Little Sparta, the garden of poet and artist Ian Hamilton Finlay, whom she met in 1997 and struck up an acquaintance. Finlay in time let her visit Little Sparta whenever she wanted, and apparently she took him up on the invitation, long enough to produce a series of scenes from that garden, often incorporating Finlay himself.
At each place, she made sketches that she then took back to her studio. Phase two involved making smaller paintings, in which she worked out more experimental ideas. Then, in the next phases, she produced the larger, finished product. All of it was done eventually from memory.
“Memory is important, even directly working from nature involves memory, memories of seeing the garden in other lights, and in other seasons, memories of Ian Hamilton Finlay, and of other people,” Hogan is quoted as saying. “I quite often work from memory, which helps me figure out what matters to me.”
That keen sense of meaning is maybe on fullest display in her paintings of Finlay — especially when it’s noted that he died in 2006 and Hogan produced her images of him in his beloved garden six years later.
Self-Portrait through Wardrobe.
There’s kind humor at work, too, that also betrays the intensity of Hogan’s restless eye. Among the portraits of acquaintances and a couple members of British royalty are paintings of the tools of her trade. Her portraits of her brushes and her paint pots show just how much wear and tear she puts on her gear. Her portrait of her painting smock is loving in the details it gives to the folds of cloth and the blasts of color that abound on it.
And then there’s Self-Portrait through Wardrobe, which on its surface is an elaborately rendered one liner — know me, know my clothes — but betrays its depth in the time Hogan has spent on the painting. It’s not just a throwaway. It’s also putting us in Hogan’s shoes, in her life. She’s giving us a glimpse of what she sees every day, a glimpse we would never get unless we went to her house. By painting her closet, Hogan has let us into her house, and as with all the images, given us yet another demonstration of the keen eye, probing intelligence, and heartfelt intensity that makes her paintings what they are.
“Eileen Hogan: Personal Geographies” runs at the very well-air-conditioned Yale Center for British Art, 1080 Chapel St., through August 11. Admission is free. Visit the museum’s website here for hours and more information.
