Having been based in inner city Dublin, in 1984 he moved with his family to live and work in a house overlooking the sea near Allihies on the Beara Peninsula. Exposed to the elements, it’s a spectacular setting by any standard, and it’s fair to say that it brought Tyrrell into the closest engagement with the landscape that we have seen in his paintings to date. Slow Turn is one of a series of large, square-formatted paintings first exhibited at the Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin in 1987 (in a two-person show, with Theo McNab, titled ‘Surface and Structure’).

All the pictures display the same diagonal pattern, their geometry underpinning passages of beautifully atmospheric textural painting. They don’t represent the landscape directly, but they are certainly responsive to its shifting light, its colour and its subtle tonality. As he noted himself at the time: “It is hard not to see my work as landscape but I have not consciously gone after it…” Writing in 1994, Dorothy Walker described this group of paintings as “certainly his finest from that period.” In them, Tyrrell acknowledges his debt to some Irish artists, notably Barrie Cooke and Patrick Collins.

Aidan Dunne

April, 2010

This lithograph was produced in an edition of ninety-nine; however, this work is the ‘hors de commerce’ issue from the limited edition. The vitrine or cage seen here became a trademark feature in the artist’s oeuvre from the mid 1940s onwards. The shape, sometimes distorted or used in the background, was often employed by the artist to suggest both the public nature of the sitter’s display as well as their isolation or perhaps captivity within the structure. Other examples where this element is utilised can be found in the Pope Series, 1951.

His use of colour, or indeed its absence, imbues these works with an ethereal quality that is gentle and understated. He is patient with the medium allowing the image to develop of out the watercolour and be shaped finally in the viewer’s eye. In contrast to his contemporary, Francis Bacon, whose handling of the same subject matter involved a visual dissection of the body and an aggressive handling of the medium, le Brocquy’s approach is calm and markedly spiritual.

The 1965 exhibition in the Dawson Gallery was the first one-man exhibition by the artist. Later that year Bourke represented Ireland at the Paris Biennale and was also awarded joint first prize in the Arts Council Competition for portrait painting. Adjudicator in 1965 was the British artist Sir William Coldstream.

Cooke first exhibited in New York in 1950 and in 1963 represented Ireland at the Paris Biennale. In 1971 he held a joint retrospective exhibition with Camille Souter in Dublin and, in the year this work was executed, he won first prize at the Irish Exhibition of Living Art. The David Hendriks Gallery was a staunch supporter of Barrie Cook’s work and he exhibited biennially with the gallery from 1961.