Paul Kerr: Everything Flows

Paul Kerr’s new work slides through the mysterious menstruum between normal perception and the meandering forms of metaphysics, where a delicate spectrum of curves and wriggling organic shapes conspire to combine as evolving and emergent beings of light and color. He paints the countryside of Ireland, or it paints through him, in fields, and flowers, and the fall, revealing the rich enigmas of the fertile and storied earth in forms rising from the gentle chaos loosed upon the land into ordered growth – these are emergent images of the animus loci, portraits of the personality of place.  

Paul Kerr, Welcome To Inch Island, Oil On Canvas, 100 x 140cm

Welcome to Inch Island is one of the older works in the exhibit. The painting is built from Kerr’s memories of the eponymous island, which rises from Lough Swilly, in County Donegal, Ireland, a threshold place set between sea and soil, connected to the mainland by a causeway cutting the water, where with characteristic softness and delicate mists of paint, Kerr finds a mysterious and emerging landscape. “When I go to the island, I often think of Yeats’ poem The Lake Isle of Inish Free,” he said. Yeats wrote,

I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

Kerr scattered a spoonful of the ashes of his mother and brother in a little dell in the land at Inch Island, “Like something you’d see in Middle-Earth,” he said, “a tiny little place, a little stream, wild flowers, they’re there. You could drive past it, and ask, ‘what’s the fuss.’ The fuss is in the beauty of the smallness, the intimacy of it.” Two strange humanoid and hybrid birds standing in profile like sentinels to Ireland’s deep eeriness are his mother and brother. “They’ve gone to another place,” continued Kerr,

Just like we don’t recognize them once they’re gone, they don’t recognize us either. There’s a causeway over to the island, and there’s an old castle on it, there’s a shingle beach and a rocky part of it where it’s difficult to get to, but I often walk around there – there are inlets and coves, and it’s not one of the dramatic islands, but its smallness and its familiarity are what forces you inside. Sometimes when you step before something grand and picturesque, you’re in awe, but you’re not going inside – everything’s outside because you’re overtaken by this image, whereas, there, you have to find the beauty in it because it’s not obvious and shouting at you. When you’re looking at these little places, walking around these small caves and cliffs, for me something happens, it brought back memories, and the memories get mixed up in what I was experiencing that day. It’s as if they were still there. I myself was transformed, but it’s not something I can put my finger on.

A blue-headed and be-legged being runs into the image like a comical sanctuary-seeking creature escaped from Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. Laughing, Kerr admits it is him, heavily disguised.

Paul Kerr, World Within Worlds, Acrylic On Canvas, 100 x 120cm

In paintings like World Within Worlds, or Entanglement, Kerr enters the planes of microscopy and magnification, revealing the energetic life that lies behind the ordinary. At his best, he seems to see within and behind the miraculous animation of organisms, creating swirling abstractions that are sensual and spiritual revelations of existence. Such lyrical imagery could be dismissed as visual hyperbolae, but Kerr is sincere in his exploration of everyday metaphysics, and genuinely lives in the slippery spaces of shamanism – a role pretended to by many players in the perception game but inhabited honestly by few. Silhouette trees form areas like networked echoes of bright synapses, and cells double in fertile clusters of exponential growth, symbols of irrepressible life bubbling in the unravelling spring.

Paul Kerr, Entanglement, Acrylic On Canvas, 107 x 107cm

Kerr doesn’t look for revelation, he lets revelations come to him. “If you’d gone looking for it, you wouldn’t have found it,” he said, “I let the thing come to me by imagination or intuition.” He has painted the music of birdsong, “I’m right here by nature and the river and the sea, I always work in silence, but I have the window open, especially if it’s summer, and it was only when I was standing looking at the painting when I realized what had happened, I put the sound of the birds into form. Then it made sense.” The paintings are not observed from nature, but from memory and mood. Kerr explained, “They’re purely something created. There’s no image like that, nothing around me, it’s what came to me in imagination as I was working at it. There are three or four paintings that have been done underneath, perhaps they weren’t speaking to me, or they weren’t going where they were supposed to, so I would take an element of that and rework a new image around it, just by being silent. I’d rather have nothing but me and the painting, and whatever images flow I’ll just follow it.”

Paul Kerr, Chimera, Ink and Pen On Paper, 42 x 60cm

Kerr is showing a string of pen and ink drawings in this exhibit, and while the hard edges and monochrome necessities of the medium push him away from the beautiful softness of his etheric paintings, he manages to find strong measures of myth and sensuality. Even in simple black and white, the images seem to radiate a satisfying hum, the vibration of the hidden energy singing behind life. He hints at a devolution of nature’s sublime power in his Chimera, where the mythic beast of Yeats’ Second Coming with “a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun” is reduced to a sad eyed creature who needs the affection and love of a hug, but its savage and fearsome claws contradict the urge to comfort.

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere  

The ceremony of innocence is drowned

Paul Kerr, Asleep In Nature, Pen and Ink, 42 x 60cm

Kerr’s pictures are no ceremony of innocence, for a sinister blade snips the frays and edge from sentiment when Kerr’s imagination wanders too much into whimsy, and a taste of darkness keeps the imagery from sugar and excess. When he draws a pretty ba-lamb in Asleep in Nature its kohl-eyed human head turns the sheepish creature into a shadow spirit of the island – a genus of woolly minotaur hovering on the verge of laughter and speaking in the weird and language of dreams. That is the constant theme of these images – we are visitors to a strange and gentle land, and must live in it, swept by wind and water, by life and light, by the overwhelming, and relentless, and unending soul of the being that gives life to all things, and penetrates perception with its sensual presence, and if we can trick ourselves over the restless threshold of sleep by counting such monstrous sheep, then that door may open into a landscape of dreams dreamt in a green night of vivid imagery, offering neither a restorative spell of slumber and sustenance, nor a fold of safe pasture, but entering into the labyrinthine planes of perception usually hidden from the waking. Kerr said, “Sometimes I thought ‘If I push this painting too far, I might be going into a metaphysical world that I may not get out of.’ The paintings are a portal into that area. I keep them on this side of being sane.”

Paul Kerr’s exhibit Everything Flows, is open between October 24 - November 9, 2024 at Sol Art, Dublin.

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