Vera Ryan | An Artist in the Painterly Tradition | Essay for Decade ( A retrospective catalogue published in 2006)
Tom Climent’s stunning degree show in 1995 showed great promise. Many degree shows do that but not every graduate is able to susain their practice or their promise. Nonetheless, many people were quietly optimistic about Tom and correctly so. Ten years on, his work is still enthralling and he has extended his vocabulary in new ways.
He works in the painterly tradition. The earlier paintings were anchored in response to great masterpieces of the Western canon, seen in reproduction by Tom. Whether looking at Velazquez or Delacroix, he would find a ‘jumping off’ point which left him free to create his own gestures, atmosphere and surface. Unable to properly see the surface and textures in reprodctions, he was free to make them up. The loose paint handling and rich surfaces of his tutor Jill Dennis’s paintings may have been an encouragement. ’I really wanted to make the textures rich. I wanted people to have a desire to pick up the paint itself.’
In some paintings such as Martha’s House (1995), Black Supper (1995) or Honey Queen (1995) we see him excercising tremendous confidence. He was partly inspired by Jackson Pollock: ‘I woudn’t like Pollock that much now but there is heroic stuff that is appealing when you see him painting – the gestural stuff, the stream of consciousness. One of the most important things is that sense of creation. It is almost like you are not in charge. You are in a relationship with the painting that guides you. You never know wha is going to come out. I feel it requires a lot of discipline. I remember Jo Allen, my first real tutor, saying you have to turn up everyday. You never know when the magic is going to come. But if you are there you will catch it.
Rather like Pollock, Tom often works partly on the floor. He does not work from life or from drawings, despite the years of life drawing he did with Jo. He often started the large canvases by hanging them on the wall, loosely blocking in the composition with acrylics. Later, he would put the canvas on the floor and pour on paint.. Harnessing his own emotion and the poured paint, his intuitive dialogue with the old masters would emerge in energetic sweeps of paint. Unlike many contemporary artists steeped in the process of quotation, Tom never dallied or juggled with his source. He worked away from quotation, so to speak, returning to it indebted for it’s anchorage. Many of the resulting paintings were breathtakingly beautiful. The scale was almost large and the music fast during those early years after graduation.
These paintings from 1995 to 2000 were energetic and exciting, revealing a richly sensuous pictoral sensibility. Figures seldom seem to be still and had an extraordinary dramatic immediacy, almost sharing their physical space with the viewers. It was as if the Baroque was being reinvented. Many of the paintings were in response to 17th century paintings. Tom saw Rembrandt in Amsterdam in 1991. It was this trip that made him creatively aware of the history of painting. When speaking of his interest in the old masters, it is striking how he never seems to veer towards narrative interpretations. It was the textures of the Rembrandts which enthused him most. In London, when he saw Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus (1601), the anchor painting for Black Supper (1995), he was surprised at how small it was. Later when he won the Tony O’Malley Award, he was able to travel in Italy for a few months in 1998. He did not get drawn into psychological interpretations of the paintings. ‘Every time I stood before a painting I liked I imagined the painter standing there painting it.’
The titles of his own paintings come after execution and perform the function of dramatising and contemporising them. It is not important to the painter that the viewer feels the same emotion that he had when making the pictures. But the making of the paintings is driven by emotion and chance. Rather than identify these emotions, even to himself, Tom says ‘ I suppose trust is big. When I paint it brings a sense of fearlessness. I place my trust in the work. If I do I feel it will be ok. It can be like a singer giving a great concert. That’s not to say I don’t criticise my work. I probably do so more now than in earlier works. They were much more spontaneous, unquestioning. Nowadays I tend to spend much longer on individual pieces, even though there are exceptions, where I’m constantly reworking and changing until I feel the piece works. But it can vary from piece to piece. There are no hard and fast rules, each one has it’s own personality. It’s finding that and allowing that to be as it is’
That attunement to the imperatives of his practice results in paintings taking very different lengths of time to execute. For example, in Alexander and Sisygambis (2002) he had plannedto put layers and layers of paint on the surface. But having worked on the canvas on the wall he recognised very quickly that he had an image which ‘had that magic’. So he left the painting as it was. Two fgures, a leaping hybrid animal shape which has appeared in other paintings like Armistice (2000) and a small still one, had huge presence. He came across the names Alexander and Sisygambis in a book around the same time and felt they matched the work, without there being any need to probe the story for equivalents. His self distancing from narratives and archetypes is clearly important for his creatiity.
By contrast with this rapidity of execution, Obscura (2002), which is 9’ by 5’ and is in the Cork City Council collection, took much longer to complete. He covered the canvas with a sap green first. He then held it upright and poured a dark industrial paint, which he had mixed up in large quantities, over the green. Literally going with the flow by turning a painting on it’s side also characterises the approach of the English artist Alexis Harding who also shares a desire to make emotion incarnate in the paint. When this treatment of Obscura was dry Tom brought in the reds. He was still uncertain. ‘It wasn’t my plan for it to be a landscape. I had in mind that very big Courbet [Burial atOrnans(1819)] in my mind. It would be the mood of it, or the tone of it I was after. That would have resonated within me. I wouldn’t look at the painting again. I would be trying to express the emotion that the painting aroused in me.’ The orange lights near the remaining green space suggest night lights. A dusty landscape had formed. In Buried on the ground(2002), figue and ground are fused. The gorgeous red, the red of pure pigment, glows and is made righter by the dark colurs surrounding it. These dark colours became like shadows, intensifying the drama, operating like chiaroscuro. This piece like Obscura pointed to a new direction in Climent’s work.
Tom’s father Angel Climent, a musician and composer from Valencia, settled in Ireland nearly 40 years ago. Tom has been living on and off in southern Spain, near Malaga since 2002, spending a few months at a time there. ‘I would have gone regularly as a child, most of my relatives live in Spain. Every time I go back it feels like going home.’ In an extended stay during 2003/4, a great change happened in Climent’s work, which had perhaps been hinted at in previous works. Doing the reverse of what Tony O’Malley did when he went to paint in the Bahamian sun in the ealy 70’s, Tom changd scale too – he began to work small. ‘I wanted the freedom to change. I didn’t want to become a prisoner of my own work. I wanted a practice where I worked slowly and steadily. Previously I’d throw myself into big paintings and then do nothing for ages. Working that size takes so much energy emotionally. I used to be drained afterwards.’
It was the kind of studio he had in Malaga that helped as well in this new direction. It was effectively an outdoor studio – the roof of the house he lived in. As is characteristic of his practice, he had no preconcieved ideas about what way the paintings would go. But being surrounded by landscape and in a different environment, his work started to change from what was previously a mostly interior structure to a more external one. Inevitably, like George Campbell who painted in the area for several months of the year in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s,Tom was struck by the difference between Spanish light and Irish light. In Malaga, the winter skies were blue all day and the light sharp. He was near the sea, surrounded by mountains. He found that the suggestion of landscape had become a major part of this new work. A more abstract sensibility began to structure these pieces, coupled with a heightened sense of colour marked this series out as a major departure in Climent’s work.
As he prepares for the transition into the seond decade of his practice, it is tempting to see significant themes and motifs in the artist’s work. Climent is elusive in this respect. Would light and dark, literally and metaphorically, be his major preoccupation? Maybe mortality? But it seems established that he does not follow the model of the artist who mines a myth or pre-occuption to nuture his creativity. He adheres to the heroic model of struggling with the material, wrestling with the paint and doing so in a wholly un-ironic way. He may prefer to continue to trust the dynamic between himself and the painting process. It has served him well.