Abstraction As A Felt Sensation. Sarah Wren Wilson Not Now Death, I’m Painting. Alan Raggett .

Sarah Wren Wilson, ‘PING PONG’, installation view, Linenhall Art Centre, August 2021; image courtesy the artist and Linenhall Art Centre.

I OFTEN THINK of my practice as an accumulation of thoughts and decisions that ultimately communicate a narrative. How this narrative evolves is a mixture of spontaneity and planned design. Despite having studied painting, both in my degree at Loughborough University and my masters at Glasgow School of Art, my practice up until 2018 largely concerned sculpture and installation. I created narrative spaces that sought to entice the viewers in acts of humorous vulnerability through various arrangements of breaking plaster floors, hanging latex and suspended glass.

Throughout 2017 and 2018, I started casting rectangular plaster pieces with embedded abstracted shapes and forms – paintings without paint – using the rectangular format as a boundary. However, frustrated by my systematic approach and driven by a desire for a more uncontained expression, I began to use paint. It offered escapism to my previously structured approach. I became somewhat fixated by paint as I yearned to understand it, often humbled when my ideas fell short to the complexities of the material.

As we entered the pandemic in early 2020 and with upcoming art opportunities postponed, I was able to paint without pressure or intended outcomes. It gave me time to properly become acquainted with paint, to experiment and to move away from a set of applied formulas towards a more liberated expression. During this time, I enrolled in the Turps Banana Correspondence Course, engaging in regular and in-depth conversation regarding compositional form, surface qualities and their contextualisation with my mentor, Andrea Medjesi.

It was a time of experimentation in my practice in which numerous paintings found their way into the studio’s ‘naughty corner’, facing the wall and shunned from the viewpoint. I learnt to surrender to expectation, often adjusting my process on a whim, as I moved from one painting to another in times of ‘stuckness’. It was through this methodology that I began to develop a series of abstracted paintings for a solo show, ‘PING PONG’, at the Linenhall Art Centre, County Mayo, from August to October 2021.

In this show, I examined the process of abstraction through a transition of narratives. A starting point for form, line and colour stemmed from daily fleeting observations from my surroundings, documented in notes and line drawings. Visually, the paintings presented a paradoxical riddle; on one hand the process was planned and ordered, while on the other it was unpredictable and precarious in areas. The surface of the paintings acted as the arena where the ephemera of our daily existence is played out in all its uncertainties, as each work attempted to make sense of a tiny fragment of time.

As a current artist-in-residence at the RHA/ IPUT Wilton Park Studios (September 2021 to 2022) my work continues to examine narrative through the realms of painting. Interested in the role of the human psyche in art and inspired by Jungian psychology, I explore the aspects of unplanned intent that become disguised and mingled within our pre-meditated compositions. I consider how abstraction can operate as a felt sensation that goes beyond any linguistic description – a language that when put into words, can often become contrived and loaded.

In terms of plans over the next few months, I am grateful to have received funding from the Arts Council of Ireland Agility Award and Monaghan County Council, as I work towards exhibitions such as the Craig Hennessy Award Shortlisted Exhibition in February at the RHA, and solo exhibitions at the RHA Ashford Gallery in April and at So Fine Art Editions in early 2023.

Sarah Wren Wilson is an Irish artist based between Dublin and Mayo whose work examines abstraction through a transition of narratives. sarahwrenwilson.com I reckon it’s more important to be committed to something than anything else to do with that thing. That you eat it, breathe it, look at it, listen to it. You must do that, all the time. If it hasn’t got to do with that and it’s not enhancing that thing, steer clear of it, go away from it. It’s not doing anything for you. Get serious, for God’s sake. Don’t waste any time.

– Patrick O’Connor (1940-2012)

IF I COULD stand up in a room, raise my hand and say, “My name is Alan Raggett and I am a contemporary landscape painter”, I just might do that. It was a realisation 44 years in the making.

It shouldn’t have come as such a surprise, as I have had an elemental attraction to forests, trees and the landscape from a young age, growing up in the countryside of County Kilkenny. We played in fields and woods every day. We disappeared mid-morning and returned home close to dinner time. I guess it was a different time, and I am now, a new emerging artist who gets to use old clichés like that.

We followed animal tracks, we fished using a jam jar full of worms as bait, and we followed streams thinking we would find their source. I always believed it was just at the horizon. I think that belief started my love affair with where the land meets the sky, because almost all my painting comes back to that imagined line. In the studio, the placement of the horizon is one of the first decisions for any freshly gessoed surface.

When I was asked to write this piece, I happily agreed, but was apprehensive, not for any lack of belief in my practice – more because I believe I am hindered by words while trying to talk about painting. In asserting that all painting is ultimately about painting itself, it is almost pointless to talk about painting. In my practice of making, I am talking to myself firstly and then subsequently to an unknown viewer, but, between those two points, I am talking to other painters and the viewer is of little relevance.

What I will say is that I am interested in things I can’t understand; that painting over failed paintings reveals a truth to me. I watch the work surface, come to life and die, again and again, like it is creating its own history. Soon I won’t obsess as much about it, because it will have taught me something that I didn’t understand. Armed with that new knowledge, I will move on to problems in the next painting, and the current piece will release its grip on me. We will no longer belong to each other. This is an esoteric daily activity.

I have worked hard, and I have been lucky enough to make a living from making and caring for art works for the past 19 years. During that time, I took a break from my practice to set up an art handling business, working for many of the country’s top galleries, museums, and universities. The plan was to run the business for three years, then appoint a manager to take over and get back into the studio. The recession in 2008 had different ideas and my three-year plan became an eight-year reality.

In 2012, the painter Patrick O’Connor passed away. He was a friend, a sometime mentor and he gave me bad coffee, which I always drank. I met Patrick in 2004 when we shared our first studio space. The opening quote is from an interview in the book published alongside his last exhibition before he passed away. I was hanging shows full time when I read these lines and knew immediately that I had to get back to the studio. It took me a further four years, but I returned to my practice in 2016.

My physical studios have changed numerous times, but the practice grows daily because, for me, it always comes back to painting. And soon, they will also say: “Did you know, he was a really good technician too?”

Alan Raggett is a Dublin-based contemporary landscape painter, who paints mostly landscapes in portrait format, with the support of his partner Ciara and two children, Quinn and Líadan. alanraggett.com