FRANK PHEL AN

3.FRAgmENt, 1967

oil on canvas 76 x 102 cms 297⁄8 x 40 ins

FOREWORDWhat makes an artist? What forms a painter? There is the clichéd explanation and there is the reality,

but is the reality different in every case?

There was seemingly little in Frank’s background to point him in the direction he finally took. There was

no art in the house but holy pictures and small, blue-and-white statues of the Virgin. There were no visits

to art galleries or sculpture gardens to whet a young appetite. Frank had no early conviction or burning

ambition to be a painter, but from a very early age, he wanted (and indeed, needed) to draw. Our father,

Michael, after completing his apprenticeship, struck out on his own with a handcart and a toolbox, and

through gumption and hard work, became a successful Dublin builder. In his late twenties, he won a

major contract to build Montague Burton’s factory in Dublin (rare, in those days, for an Irish-Catholic to

win a major English contract). Over the years, our father saw Frank’s urge to draw grow, and eventually

he helped secure him a place at the Royal Institute of Architects of Ireland School.

Frank’s earlier schooling had been with the James’s Street Christian Brothers School, which was hard

and brutal; punishment being meted out with canes and quarter-inch, stiff leather straps. Frank rebelled

and ran away daily, “mitching”, as it was called in those days. The solution was to send him to Tipperary

to board at Rockwell College, which was run by the Holy Ghost Fathers. Contrary to the popular song,

however, his heart did not remain there, and he has travelled a long way from there since.

While there was no art in the house, there was, in the Irish way, music and singing, which we all

hugely enjoyed. When a good singer or a skilled pianist came to the house, friends and relatives were

invited to listen and join in. Our mother Tess, had a fine voice, and before her marriage, harboured a

secret ambition to be an opera singer. As a child, her father had loved classical music and made her

family spend evenings listening to radio concerts. So perhaps, the creative gene travelled through

her to Frank, assisted by the drive and instinctive intelligence that drove our Father. For a time, his

success ensured our family a comfortable life, and after Frank left architecture school, he was able to

help him find employment as a draftsman in a structural engineering firm; a post he greatly enjoyed.

7.ANAscAuL , 2003/07

oil on canvas 41 x 51 cms 16 x 201⁄8 ins

FRank PhEl an:tRANsFoRmiNg tHE visuAL woRLd

Faced with a blank canvas, Frank Phelan sums up his intention as making a painting with no subject,

or at least one in which the subject is indiscernible. The small painting, Anascaul (cat. 7) might

be understood as subject-free, though it is immediately recognisable as an attractive and, in some

way, truthful image. It exudes a sense of light as a passing phenomenon and, if we do not entirely

understand the significance of the spidery black marks, we recognise them as a necessary counterpoint

to the light. Phelan is an abstract artist, which is to say his paintings are not faithful depictions ‘of’ a

person or a place but are, rather, ‘about’ the impact of the world around him. Painting is a process of

transformation in which he converts what he sees into equivalent colours, forms and spaces. He finds

this approach more stimulating than painting a posed figure or a ‘view’ but it is difficult to sustain as it

demands that he constantly draw on themes and images from an internal store or ‘memory bank’. His

habitual starting point – and what might be described as his default activity – is drawing, in charcoal

or ink. Phelan maintains that drawing is the constant, recognisable factor in his work, an activity that

renders him free to experiment and play. He draws – and paints – on holidays in Greece and Italy and

at home regularly attends a life-drawing club (Tenor Sax, cat. 24) but particularly enjoys drawing birds,

among which he favours crows. His fondness for these unloved creatures is an indication of the way

he works: always against the grain of easy solutions.

When he started to paint, Phelan needed an identifiable subject to be able to make the first marks.

Nowadays he simply draws fast and randomly on the canvas with charcoal until the marks become

habitual, producing an image that demands to be taken further, in paint, often retaining the charcoal

traces (Interior, cat. 9; Blue Dominant, cat. 13). In other words, drawing provides the route into the

painting that is yet to be made. Phelan also recognises a subconscious thought process that contributes

to the final image, which may be prompted as much by his extensive reading (Joyce, Rimbaud and the

Goncourt brothers crop up in conversation) as by visual stimuli.

39.sigNiFiER, 2014oil and graphite on board 36 x 41 cms 141⁄8 x 16 ins

40.iNtERioR, 2014

oil on canvas laid to board 31 x 33 cms 12 x 131⁄8 ins

41.sEcREt LocK diAgoNAL , 2014

oil on canvas 51 x 61 cms 197⁄8 x 24 ins

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