Marriage Story. Chanelle Walshe The Power of Things. Comhghall Casey.

Chanelle Walshe, Night Walk, 2022, oil on canvas; photograph by Kate Bowe, courtesy the artist.

AS I WRITE, two 6ft by 6ft paintings lean against my studio wall, here in Dublin City. They will soon be collected by a courier and taken to The RHA, to be displayed in the Hennessy Craig Award Exhibition, which opens to the public on 18 February. I have been shortlisted for the award along with nine other artists who work in painting. It has been an interesting few months, as I have challenged myself with a number of things – a new subject matter (flowers), a changing colour palette, and a larger scale. As someone who is slight and five foot, four inches in height, it has been particularly satisfying to make work that is larger than me, and which really demands my attention.

The pandemic both disrupted and enabled my creative expression. At first, I was distracted and thrown off course by the closure of medical museums, which house source material for my paintings of human organs. Using flowers as a starting point for paintings had been on my mind for years, but I didn’t have the head space to explore this. Thankfully, what I initially thought was an obstruction to my work was actually the permission I needed to get started on the flower paintings. My first was of two white roses – my favourite.

Flowers fascinate me because I see them as sculptures that are alive, going from full bright bloom to a crispy, paper-like form that turns inwards, always held up on a stem. They are like bodies too. Sometimes they have a lot to say; sometimes they are very quiet. Most of my flower paintings started off with a memory relating to a person in my life, usually female. I photograph and keep flowers that have been gifted to me. I often think about flowers that were at a particular event on a particular day. I’ll ask lovers and friends what type of flower they like the most.

I often make drawings first. I like to place flowers close together and imagine that they are characters in conversation. When I am painting, I seek out contrast in colour, as well as subtlety. I also like a sense of separation between the flowers and the background, and I tend to build up heavy layers of paint and texture. By the time the painting is becoming resolved, there has usually been so many adjustments made to colour and shape that I have ended up far away from what I thought it would look like. The painting will still remind me of the person I was thinking about when I started. To me they are like love stories or love letters, no longer happening in real life, but the narrative continues in the studio.

Last summer was very busy for me, as I co-organised an exhibition, called ‘WE CAN DANCE’ in West Cork, alongside Susan Montgomery, Aileen Murphy, Sarah O’Brien, Mollie Douthit and Sinéad Ní Mhaonaigh. It was one of the most rewarding and satisfying activities of my career so far for a number of reasons. Self-organised and very egalitarian, the exhibition took place in two beautiful wooden structures on a piece of land, surrounded by trees. People came from far and wide to see it, and we managed to safely have an opening, performance events, a talk and a two-week run, all during the pandemic. It was a time when we felt like nothing was happening and the art world was sleepy, so taking action ourselves and seizing the opportunity of good weather and relatively manageable covid restrictions was the best thing to do. It started with a phone call between Susan Montgomery and I in mid-June and by late-September, we had opened the show. Sara O’Rourke wrote a beautiful accompanying text, entitled Watch Them Dance, and Jesse Jones facilitated an artists’ talk with students from the BAVA degree programme on Sherkin Island.

Now as spring draws closer, I am planning new paintings and processing what I have learned in recent months. I think of painting as a marriage. I’ve made a commitment to it, and I have a responsibility to participate in this relationship, this dialogue, this intimate connection to image-making.

Chanelle Walshe is an artist living and working in Dublin. chanellewalshe.com MY WORK CONSISTS predominantly of observational figurative oil painting and drawing. While my output can be divided into three main strands – object studies, portraiture and life painting/drawing – it is the object study element, observed directly from life, which is at the centre of my practice.

Objects have meaning. In the 2010 BBC Radio 4 programme, A History of the World in 100 Objects (Episode 100), presenter Neil McGregor of the British Museum talks of “the power of things to connect us to other lives across time and place”. This power of things is key to my work.

In school I was drawn towards this direct observation of objects and people. I began studies in Foundation Art in Belfast in 1994. In 1996 my self-portrait was selected for the RUA Annual Exhibition in Belfast and won a prize. The prize was sponsored by the Belfast-based art dealer, Michael Flanagan, who became pivotal to my career some years later.

In 1998, I graduated from Belfast School of Art with a BA Hons in Fine Art, specialising in painting. After six months on unemployment benefits, working on my paintings in a bedroom/studio in Belfast, I was approached again by Michael Flanagan, who offered to buy any paintings I produced. These were then exhibited and sold through Michael’s gallery, The Emer, in Belfast. This meant that if I completed a painting, I knew I would get paid. This arrangement with Michael continued for the next ten years, until 2009. Without this amazing support from the beginning of my career, it would have been financially much more difficult to establish myself as an artist. I will always be grateful to Michael, who sadly died in November 2021.

In 2000, I moved to Dublin where I have been able to continue working full time as an artist. I have continued to regularly submit work to the RHA and RUA annual exhibitions. They have been an invaluable way to present my work to a larger audience. In 2017, I was elected an associate member of the Royal Ulster Academy. I am currently working towards a solo exhibition in June 2022 with Solomon Fine Art in Dublin. This will be my sixth solo exhibition with the gallery and will present a new collection of object studies.

The process of painting these works begins when an object presents itself as something that will translate well into paint. This single object or a group of objects is carefully placed on a flat neutral surface, allowing slight reflections and shadows which interact to throw subtle tonal contrasts. The object is cast in a softly muted northern light, evenly spread but with a clear indication of its source.

A preliminary drawing is completed accurately and precisely. Based on this drawing, a composition is decided, and a canvas is made up. The size of the canvas is determined by the object’s size – the painted object will be the same size as the real object. The exclusion of extraneous environmental features neutralises any narrative contexts which might over-sentimentalise the object.

The object is then meticulously rendered on the canvas over a period of days in an initial layer of instinctive painting. A second layer is then painted from life to make any necessary adjustments. When the bulk of the information has been painted from life, I then progress the work using my own judgement and artistry to improve, enhance, emphasise and edit. Colour, tone and line are balanced over a period of months – without further reference to the subject – as the painting requires. Technical skills and aesthetic judgements interact to allow the object to stand on its own within the painting, creating a powerful focus within a simple composition.

The intention is that the resulting images are deadpan – without sentimentality – tangible, tactile, distinct and convincing. They are arranged with the sparsest of spatial markers, devoid of allegory or affectation. The resulting paintings amplify and extend the presence of the subject depicted, inviting the viewer to bring their own experiences to the subject. In giving focus and distillation to the objects their presence and potency is increased and they hold a solid delicacy.

Comhghall Casey is a figurative artist based in Dublin comhghall.com