|
Billy
Merwick, Artist
|
|
“My
painting is really about revealing experience through a kind of
‘distorted reality’ that is not abstract but perhaps a little bit naïve –
not to be confused with simplicity. My painting is very expressionistic,
the sense of colour is so vital - and the intensity of the eyes. It is
the viewer who will read what I am doing …”
|
Image Gallery
To view some of Billy’s works
For prices and ordering information contact: info@bookconsult.com
“There is a story in
every picture, told by the artist and awaiting interpretation by each
viewer.”
The Billy Merwick Story
Billy Merwick was born in 1947 in Bandon, County Cork
where he went to Hamilton
High School and to
Coláiste Íosagáin, Ballyvourney. He worked in the Civil Service Commission for
a short time before quitting to concentrate on music, educational theatre
and finally, painting.
He travelled Europe and North America with
the Youth Theatre before he settled in Brussels
in Belgium
where he earned a living as an English teacher, a street busker, a poster
designer and jack-of-all-trades for several years. He has also tutored in a
pilot workshop scheme set up to assist school drop-outs find their feet
through art.
Billy works in his Brussels studio, exhibiting his paintings
and sculpture there with success for the past twenty-five years.
His ‘naïve’ and
theatrical style in many of these works blends humour and tragedy as they
spiral each other for dominance. His people are ever moving forward to a
future and carrying a past in their piercing eyes. Memory is at the centre
of this artist’s search as he probes among people and places for the
stories he wants to tell. There is a story in every picture, told by the
artist and awaiting interpretation by each viewer.
Exhibitions include: Le Bouglant Gallery /workshop, Ghislenghien
(1994); Theatre des Quatre Mains, Beauvechain (1994); Galarie
Caracteres, Brussel (1995); La Vie Sauvage, Brussel (1995); The
Irish Institute for European Affairs, Leuven (1996); Zichy+Low Art
Gallery, Brussel (1997); Atelier “B”, Venice (1997); Artist’s
Studio, Brussel (1999, 2000, 2001, 2002); The Cultural Centre,
Jacques Franck, Brussel; (Dec. 2002)
The
Blue Leaf Gallery (Fairview & Pembroke St), Dublin exhibitions. Christmas 2002; First
Solo Irish Exhibition ‘Home Sweet
Home’, 27 April - 16 May 2003; ‘Exhibition
of Oils & Drawings’, September 2006
Represented in Ireland
by Seamus Cashman, BookConsulT, 68
Mountjoy Square, Dublin
1
For prices and ordering information contact: info@bookconsult.com
Extracts from the
artist, Eugene Magowan’s speech
to open Billy’s
2006 exhibition in Dublin:
... in a world of
uncertainty, we need to be sure of things, but we should acknowledge that
our comfortable assumptions may often be invalid. … A comforting notion
about art is that the only truth is between the viewer and the picture. We
often hear somebody say, ‘I don’t know much about painting but I know what
I like.’ But I wonder is this true – are we not saying ‘I like what I know’
…?
In this respect, Billy
Merwick’s pictures may be bracketed by us as naïve or primitive – but that
does them a disservice. Naïve, primitive, supposedly untrained, wild – but
I have noticed with a lot of so-called primitive art that it displays an
obsession with its borders. Sure
it has that raw, untutored element but it seems to frighten itself at the
edge and runs back to the safe containment within the border. But in
Billy’s case, he seems to have trouble with the containment of the frame,
his paint runneth over ... Paul Klee described drawing as ‘. . taking a
line for a walk’. But in Billy’s pictures the line will come back dazed.
And yet, there’s also a gentility, a childish knowing naughtiness, indeed
an innate, confident willfulness that is often heard in poetry recited in
the vernacular.
Sure, the pictures ignore the
conventions of the traditional academy. But that is nothing new, we have seen
before how art unshackled itself to give voice to new ways of expression.
In terms of modernism, on the one hand we have those who eschew
representation and seek to deliver iconic images that are massively open to
interpretation, and on the other hand we have the representationalists, who
give us sheep on a mountain or flowers in a vase.
People say painting reveals,
but very often it does not reveal anything other than technique,
draughtsmanship. Just think about it for a minute, painting your wall at
home covers up dirty marks. It’s no different with oil painting, it covers
up, disguises mistakes – but not in Billy’s case, this is raw, forceful
expression that seems to want to show you its construction and the mistakes
made along the way. In this sense, it is the underbelly, the guts of
painting.
I see Billy’s pictures as
being resolved, because they seek to reveal more honesty than many other
types of pictures reveal. And they are resolved in harmonic terms, there is
a language, there is a code to them – the choice of one major colour theme,
the washy outlines are all part of a code of representation, there is no
desire to divorce representation as with abstraction, ... there is a desire
to embrace it but to embrace it with a rekindling of an ancient language of
the felt truths that have always added to our enjoyment of narratives and
storytelling. You will see this in many great artists as they matured:
Yeats moved to this style, away from his sturdy woodcuts, Picasso covered
all the bases and ended up where Billy is now. I think many artists would
envy Billy his freedom of line, as the nature of painting is that it begs
you to contrast your edges, to contain, to define and so, to suffer the
prejudice of definition.
These pictures are also of
their time, they are evolved because we are evolved – their freedom is not
the freedom of the innocent, because in our rational, news-ready world,
there are no innocents any more. What has changed is us – we now bring new
intelligence to our viewing and interpreting of images. When we look for
the new movement, there is no need to look outside of the abstract versus
representational boundaries. I suggest look within to find where they fuse,
look for the current zeitgeist, the questioning spirit of our times. Take a
chance, take a risk. This is art that you will have to argue for and defend
– and you will have to risk being misunderstood.
|
