Germaine Dolan - 'in conversation'

Germaine Dolan talks to Myles Corley about a life immersed in the arts. "And See Whole" runs at Linden Hall Studio from April 10th - May 1st 2016. Dolan’s work is complex. It repays, even demands, a certain concentration. The most recent work, the very exciting “Broadway Jungle” 2015, is a cornucopia of colour and freely made marks, held together in a taut but discreet architecture. There are, at least, fifteen different colours, from white to charcoal, eight different kinds of mark. Paint applied flatly, probably with a broad brush, dribbled lines, splashes, scratches. Sometimes densely opaque, elsewhere one colour can glow through another. Dolan is particularly good at dealing head on, with no man’s land, the middle of the habitat. The glorious overlapping reds in “Sohan”, the fluorescence of the dropped green circles in “Oasis”, the glaring orange and yellow ladder in “Broadway Jungle”. These ‘take the eye’ but bestow the rest of the image on the seeing eye. It is Dolan’s achievement to make perfectly convincing, heartwarming images of great originality, both unexpected and intimate, without recourse to any particular Western set of conventions. An habitué of the Sinai Desert for 35 years, it may be possible to sense in the colour choices and designs, something of Arabia. And certainly the un European-ness of the desert, the upside-down-ness of sky-land sensations, odd conjunctions of rock and sand. Painting is kept alive by painters. And that is all.