Every visual experience is at one and the same time a receiving of fragmentary information, a giving of form to those visual sensations, and the arousing of a felt response - for artist Paddy Lennon, what ultimately matters is the quality of feeling that results.
Through environmental experience, the mind builds a construct of the world and stores images for later reference. Inspired by the landscape, Lennon is interested in connecting the physical to stored cognitive images, making associations, and communicating meaning beyond the literal. In an effort to make associations, he is sensitive to and utilizes the basic visual vocabulary of form, colour, texture, and light and shade. He intuitively understands that every aspect of this vocabulary exerts intrinsic force into a context/composition. Singularly and in combination, Lennon’s handling of these elements and their organization connect with stored images to bring forth associations and felt responses in the mind’s eye.
Lennon seeks to raise awareness of characteristics in the landscape that concentrate and intensify meaning - bog water, bog pools, the water’s edge. Through abstraction, he eliminates from consideration some of the attributes of the physical world to concentrate on other aspects which he reconfigures in a manner that connects with and stimulates the imagination.
This emphasis on a felt language which resonates from the landscape is enhanced by Lennon’s poetic use of Irish language in the titles of his work. Many Irish words derive from a world in which the unseen is as real as the seen. Words like sclimpíní, for example, conveys the effect of lights dancing before one’s eyes – either real light or the supernatural. One of Lennon’s formative experiences of colour is of being transfixed by the translucence emitted by stained glass windows in church as a child, “It had the power to transform a duty-bound incarceration into a warm rich colourful embrace”. Childhood outings to the mountains and the sea lead to his appreciation of nature and the land as vibrant, sentient beings. In as much as a single word in Irish can unlock the hidden richness in the landscape, Lennon works in Amuigh faoin Spéir operate in the same way.
Catherine Bowe, Curator, Wexford Arts Centre.
