Marcus Brennan spent a decade in New York painting cityscapes and interiors and group shows and slowly understanding that none of it was what he wanted to be doing. The city produced work he could explain. The west of Ireland produced work he couldn't, and couldn't has always been, for him, the more interesting condition.
The Return
He returned to County Clare in 2009, moving into a farmhouse near Ballyvaughan with a studio attached that his mother had used for twenty years as a weaving room. The transition from New York to the Burren was, he has said, less of a shock than people expected. "New York is very loud about itself," he told an interviewer in 2018. "The west of Ireland is very quiet about itself. But both are absolutely certain of what they are. The certainty was familiar."
The work changed immediately. The New York paintings had been competent and well-received and, in retrospect, perfectly empty. The Clare paintings were stranger, darker, less assured - and they were the first things he had made that seemed to him worth making. The Atlantic light, which is unlike any light found in cities, was doing something to his perception of colour that he was only beginning to understand.
The Burren
The Burren is a limestone plateau - approximately three hundred and fifty square kilometres of exposed grey rock in the north of County Clare, a landscape unlike anywhere else in Ireland or, arguably, anywhere else in Europe. It is austere in a way that words tend to soften. In winter, in rain, with the low cloud that spends much of the year sitting on it, it is among the bleakest environments in the temperate world. Brennan considers it the most beautiful.
His paintings of the Burren are not picturesque. They do not resolve into the kind of composition that makes landscape painting comfortable. The skies are often flat and grey and present more weight than drama. The foreground limestone does not lead anywhere. The paintings resist the narrative structures that viewers bring to landscape, and offer in their place a quality of direct confrontation with a place that will not perform for the camera, the tourist, or the painter who wants to please.
The Atlantic
The Atlantic paintings are different in character from the Burren work - larger, more open, the palette lighter where the water catches whatever light the sky provides. Brennan has spoken of the difference between painting rock and painting water as a difference between painting what resists time and painting what is nothing but time. "The Burren has been there for three hundred and fifty million years," he has said. "The Atlantic changes every four seconds. I need both of those facts."
Both works currently available on Artemble - The Burren in Rain and Atlantic at Doolin - are from the past two years and represent the mature phase of a practice that has taken twenty years to arrive here.