Snippets from the Critics

 

‘expect a landscape painting to show some trace of the presence of man.   Even Turner’s vistas are full of ships, boats and distant architecture.   It is a genre which has for so long been used as an indication of the dominance of man over the environment, a back-drop for the questionnable achievements of ‘civilisation’, that we are unused to seeing nature ‘by itself’.

Four-fifths of the surface of a Kavanagh painting is sky, sometimes there is no land at all, and when it is included the only structure visible is the natural meander of a river or the mountain mirroring sheen of a calm sea at night.   By focusing on the natural meteorological phenomenon of the sky, stripped of all signs of the modern world, or of any intervention of nature which could be construed as ‘picturesque’ – you would never see an aeroplane, let alone a bird crossing a Kavanagh sky – the artist is able to reinvent the very notion of landscape.

Kavanagh chooses the most extreme states of atmospheric disruption – imminent storms, searing sunsets and blistering dawns – not only in order to portray nature divested of all our attempts to tame it, but also to be able to fully explore all the possibilities of the medium of oil paint to embody the grandeur and beauty that is ‘nature by itself’.

Richard Dyer – Art Critic    Contemporary, Frieze

 

 

‘Jim’s paintings are strikingly powerful.   While suggestive of an underlying violence they also hint at a calmness after the storm, a light that glimmers through darkness.  They are images I feel, which are apposite for an artist working in the west of Ireland.  Many of them remind us of the neat infinity of the sea and the transient beauty of its interaction with the light.

His is a magnificent  technique which allows these two extremes of power and tenuous peace to coexist in the same work of art.   His use, also, of paints and materials shows not just the evidence of a highly original and creative mind, but of the pursuit of precision and perfection in the craft. 

There is a spiritual, one might say, ethereal quality to the work’. 

Preface to Western Journey -  Michael D Higgins TD, President

 

 

‘A blood-soaked sky stretches back as far as the eye can see.   Unsettled clouds are stained by the sanguine glow, while an earth-coloured mass beneath cowers like some obedient servant.   Then, as if from nowhere, our eyes are blinded by a piercing streak of motlen gold and sweeping brimstone.   Is it an image of destruction or rebirth, we ask ourselves?   Victory or defeat?   Are we standing at the edge of the abyss or the entrance to our own private Eden?

Most of Kavanagh’s work begin with layers of one colour, working them in, letting them dry, and then beginning the process all over again.   Each layer of oil paint is mixed with Stand Oil, a kind of glaze made from tree sap which was once favoured by the Old Masters, but is rarely used by painters today.   Over a period of time, this gives an incredible translucency to the colour.   Then, with a cloth soaked in white spirit, he sketches a very vague outline of a landscape and begins to pull away at the pigment – ‘scumbling’ as the technique is called’.  

Ria Higgins – Art Critic    The Sunday Times, What’s on in London

 

 

‘Staunchly against establishing a god of any kind however, in his kingfisher tyrian seascapes or ruby-molten landscapes, Kavanagh is amongst the first to acknowledge an intangible, spiritual, world soul which is somehow responsible for shaping, colouring and giving texture to the earth whilst retaining its mystery and power. 

The power and expanse of nature – its beauty and blind justice – is celebrated in these glowing icon lavished with paints which still seem wet, light and shade blending together, land and sky meeting in a kiss.  Colour harmonics establish a strange, unheard orchestra.   But then, as John Keats observes:

‘Heard melodies are sweet –

But those unheard are sweeter still.’

Kavanagh chooses to repeat the essential spirit of nature in image after image – day and night and all the moods inbetween, lending character traits to crenellated promontories and lush green swards.   The sun comes magnesium bright, tearing through steamy clouds.   The moon pours milk adn ice through skies devoid of stars to create inky pools juxtaposed by ivory fragments.   The seductive quality Kavanagh manages to instill in these hypnotic and elegant works cannot be doubted.

Using brushes, fingers and gravity, his paints are lavishly applied, stippled and pulled, creating mystical, magical shapes which have a powerful resonance.   Glazing, scumbling and high gloss varnishing create empty stages and arenas for little human time bombs.   Despite the fact that nature also dies, it has a curious constancy and as such, immortality beyond our own.   Nature is, we discover, its own stage’.

Robin Dutt – Art Critic   The Sunday Times, The Independent

Jim Kavanagh