by Tom Mooney
What was said of painter Roderick O’Conor –that he responded in a very direct manner to feelings and emotion – could be applied with equal measure to the late Fr. John O’Brien, an artist of both immense depth and control.
There are many similarities between O’Conor and O’Brien: they were adept at conveying a primitive and pious simplicity in their landscapes, they were transfixed by the solitary rural scene and they technically could adapt to the transmogrification of discipline between landscape and still life.
At his creative peak, Fr. O’Brien was a conveyor belt of a school of painting that was not limited to a doctrine. If anything, his style had an immeasurably slow gestation, not necessarily noticeable from one year to the next at his annual exhibition during the Wexford Festival, but line up two landscapes a decade apart and the evolution of his eye is discernible.
His brilliance was in the invisibility of his gift: it can be quite difficult for an artist to parade the immediacy of a scene in a landscape, but O’Brien kept a tight leash on the arbitrariness of his colours, always soft, rarely loud, and he allowed the duchas of a scene to orchestrate the emotional context of the work.
Observing his conciliatory eye in his AchillIsland and French landscapes, you admired his generosity with oil, his refusal to bow to its viscosity, his homage to the undisturbed heartbeat of a place, and you vicariously imagined what it was about the view that moved the artist in the first place.
His work, though it spans two centuries, was rooted in the Romantic tradition, more literary than artistic, personified by Wordsworth’s ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ in the preface to Tintern Abbey.
Despite his vocation, it would be inaccurate to label Fr. O’Brien a religious painter or, by extension, a spiritual painter: his landscapes were never less than lyrical, and he could breathe life, even a joie de vivre, into the immobility of the most stubborn of scenes.
The jury has always been out on whether it would be fair to describe him as a dispassionate artist; an excellent draughtsman who loved to paint en plein air, he set out to reflect and not to interpret, but gradually his work became instantly identifiable, and he was forever truthful in the reproduction and depiction of what he saw.
That his art was devoid of ambiguity, or hesitation, and the fact that he was an intelligent and a giving man, with a discerning eye, methodical without being a slave to a method, might just partially explain his success as a painter, a modest artist who achieved greatness.
