I started painting when I read Helene Parmelin's account of Picasso at work: 'Taking a line for a walk ...'.

A French Influence

Irish Times art critic Aidan Dunne observed that "Callan's work is like a love affair with French painting", and this seems comprehensively accurate, since Callan began painting in Valbonne in the South of France in the eighties and titled his first exhibition, staged at Dublin's Blue Leaf Gallery in May 2002, "A Workshop in France".

Subsequently his work ran on two parallel tracks. His figurative nudes featured in the Blue Leaf's Nude group showing in November 2002, and more detailed figurative work, taken from his heavily illustrated poetry notebooks, was the focus of the "Fifty Fingers" exhibition, which opened in August 2003. In tandem with this figurative work, Callan's experiments in abstract cubism have produced strikingly individual works peopled with statuesque Hellenic imagery.

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Michael Feeney Callan’s art may be purchased directly from this site, or at the Blue Leaf Gallery in Dublin (blueleafgallery.com). Costs are inclusive of packaging and shipping.

Arcadia Suburbia
This is a preview of work-in-progress on combined themes of adolescent iconography and fantasy, due for exhibition during 2010. Callan has been working on the pieces since 2007 and comments: “The concept arose from studying the work of Ernest Shepard, Arthur Rackham and Alfred Bestall, the amazing illustrator of Rupert the Bear. I spotted the 1957 endpapers of the Rupert Christmas annual, and saw from content and layout how they’d inspired Paul McCartney, who was a huge Rupert fan, to write We All Stand Together - the Bestall painting is, literally, the Frog Chorus. That was the kick-off. The painting called “Maud Goes”, for instance (the woman in wellies, with the child disappearing through the fence) comments on loss of innocence and is, of course, a take-off of Shepard’s drawings for the 1924 A. A. Milne book, When We Were Very Young.”
Colour of Life
This work was exhibited at the Blue Leaf Gallery, Dublin, in 2002.
Its origins as a collection date back to 1985, when Callan began painting in Chateauneuf de Grasse, in southern France. “It’s the academic cliche, but the light got me. I always doodled (see the current diaries), but in France I began with oils. When I found the Fondation Maeght in St Paul de Vence, which Roger Moore introduced me to in May 1990, I was further egged on. Chagall, Bonnard, Matisse, Picasso .... everyone I love is displayed there.” These paintings attempt a primal honesty about light and form and France - although one or two are images of Diamond Head, the volcanic headland in Hawaii.
Prayerful Moment
These paintings occupied the period from 2005-2007 and focused on icon-making. Callan says the work was unplanned: “It was impossible not to be affected by the distorted reality of iconography in company of the likes of Redford. I found myself constantly drawing him - as he, as a youngster, drew everyone he encountered and, yes, he also drew me, and presented me with the piece.” The sketches were less portraiture than an interpretation of the stony abstraction of iconography, says Callan. “Spontaneously I found myself constructing images of significance in the journey of my own life: Hemingway, Francis Bacon, Yeats, Edward Hopper.” There were other images in relatable monochromatic stoniness: Hellenic woman, the Jesus fisherman, his children.
Sketchbooks
The sketchbooks are lifelong. Callan says: “I originally wrote diaries for fun - all the usual self-involved teenage angst stuff. Later the cut-ups of William Burroughs nudged me to splurge more wildly. So the diaries became great outflowings of scribbles, appointments, researches, poems ... and considered, preparatory artwork. When I was crisscrossing America over several years - literally from Honolulu to Miami, Sand Francisco to New York - these journals were life-savers. They recorded the emotions and responses to a very long drawn out project that fundamentally changed my attitude to film, art, writing and life.”

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