Andrew McIlroy

PLUNGE

In revisiting the sea as subject for his latest body of paintings, Andrew McIlroy investigates childhood memories, the sea forming an inherent part of psychic life.  Plunging into shadowy depths, lost suspended in the vastness for a moment, these works are imbued with a poetic mystery and a sense of the sublime; yet they hint at the promise of resurfacing to the familiar sounds of summer vacation and youthful exuberance.  In composition and in his skilled use of tone, McIlroy is drawn towards abstraction, whilst remaining true to the European Romantic tradition in choice of subject and methodology of highly glazed, fine painting.

Partly autobiographical, these paintings recall McIlroy's long family summers, diving off the Portsea pier for hours, and of a familiar voice calling him home.  Present also is a sense of unease permeating the works.  The fears invoked by deep waters and sinking into the abyss, deliver poetic metaphors for anxieties which gripped the artist's own childhood. 

These are, too, universal works, offering to us a sense that we've been here before, provoking recollections of our own awe of watery depths or terror of the unknown.  In this, we are reminded of the menace of Rick Amor's solitary man running down Frankston pier, of the darkness and the terror of his oceans.

One of McIlroy's hero painters, Amor further influences his love of intelligent painting, and a desire to create excursions in intellectual activity.  In his attempt to capture the sublime in paint, and in describing the sea as his inspiration, McIlroy refers to Edmund Burke's profound treatise, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful.

"' No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as terror; and whatever is terrible with regard to sight, is sublime... The sublimity of the ocean is due to the fact that it is an object of no little terror'' (Sect II, Part II).

Burke goes on to describe vacuity, darkness, solitude and silence, vastness, or greatness of dimension, all as powerful causes of the sublime.

In examining these principles in paint, McIlroy has succeeded.  Not attracted to the bold, gestural and at times anguished strokes of abstract painting associated with modernism, the artist combines his semi-abstract compositions with a reverence for the traditional trained hand of the Masters. The result is a superb manipulation of a narrow palette, bringing power and depth to these pervasive, intelligent canvases.

Brenda Colahan 2009