Jim Manley

Jim Manley is an artist, born on 17 January 1934, in St Helens, Lancashire, England. He has lived in Killough, County Down, Northern Ireland since 1971. He uses mixed media (mainly water colours and acrylic).

elected exhibitions - Jim Manley

cite web | title= Jim Manley| work=Tom Caldwell Gallery | url=http://www.tomcaldwellgallery.com/artist_display.asp?ArtistID=163 | accessdate=2007-07-21]
*1976 Arts Council Gallery, Belfast
*1978 Davis Gallery, Dublin
*1979/80 Bell Gallery, Belfast
*1982/84 Lincoln Gallery, Dublin
*1985 Fenderesky Gallery, Belfast
*1986 Hendricks Gallery, Dublin
*1989/91 Solomon Gallery, Dublin
*1992/94/97/99 Duncan Campbell, London
*1992/93 The coast of Co. Down, Downpatrick, Sligo, Cavan, Armagh
*1993 Bluecoat Chambers, Liverpool
*1995 Basement Gallery, Dundalk
*1996 Dyehouse Gallery, Waterford
*1997 Blackcombe Gallery, Cork
*1997 Ayesha Castle, Killiney
*1998 Wolfson College, Oxford
*1998 Croatian Embassy, London
*2001/3 Duncan Campbell, London
*2004 Origin Gallery, Dublin

elected exhibitions - various artists

*1980/99 Royal Ulster Academy (RUA)
*1988 Ulster Way - Galleries throughout Ireland
*1989 The Mournes, Narrow Water Gallery, Warrenpoint
*1990 Young EVA, Limerick
*1991 Paradise Island, Bluecoat Chambers, Liverpool
*1991/99 IONTAS, Sligo
*1994 Watercolours at the Walker, Liverpool
*1995 Blian is Fice as Fag, Sligi
*1997 Honouring Colmcille, Donegal/Edinburgh
*2003 Exhibition Of The Sea, Leith, Edinburgh
*2004 IONTAS, Sligo

Awards

*1979 McGonigal Prize, Oireachtas
*1984 Paton's Prize, EVA
*1997 Landscape Prize, RUA
*1997 Elmwood Gallery, Smallworks
*1999 Painting Prize, IONTAS
*2005 Ross’s Watercolour Prize, RUA

Watercolours purchased by public collections

*Conrad Hotel - Dublin
*UTV - Belfast
*Stormont Castle - Belfast
*Abbott Hall - Kendal
*Walker Art Gallery- Liverpool
*Bank of Ireland - Dublin
*Allied Irish Bank International
*Arts Council of Northern Ireland
*Down County Museum

Watercolours purchased by private collections

*His Excellency the Croatian Ambassador - Dubrovnik
*Seamus Heaney
*Stephen Rea
*Dean Sullivan
*Lady Lea Leigh
*the late Colin Middleton

Jim Manley - The Sweeney Paintings & Atlantic Sheep (November 1999)

His choice of the Sweeney theme, which he has quarried at intervals for nearly two decades, is not as strange as it may seem. Sweeney, as created in the Irish epic Buile Suibhne - one of the major achievements of medieval literature - inhabits the topography of County Antrim and the adjacent County Down. It is natural that Manley, the hill walker and mountain-climber, should respond to the medieval poet's descriptions of what Seamus Heaney (who translated the epic into English) termed the 'beauties and seventies of the natural world'.

The story focuses upon the fate of Sweeney, the King of Dal Araidhe, who was cursed by Saint Ronan, turned into a bird, and driven mad, left foraging for himself until the curse was fulfilled by his death. The title of Heaney's version, Sweeney Astray, prompted the artist in a certain direction. There is a scrake of volcanic rock which juts out of the sea called Ailsa Craig. If you take the ferry from Northern Ireland to Scotland you'll notice off the coast of Ayrshire. How, wondered the artist, would Sweeney survive on such an inhospitable, place, albeit one that was a veritable city of nesting birds?

Now Sweeney is a useful metaphor for writers and artists. Indeed Heaney himself carefully and somewhat dryly notes that he can read as 'the figure of the artist, displaced, guilty, assuaging himself by his utterance'. Put another way, Sweeney represents irrepressible freedom: the writer and artist refusing to be constrained by clerical, Christian, or indeed any form of obligation. As Manley paints him he is clearly refusing to be bound by sexual restraints either. His Sweeney is a naked male, launched upon a vicarious existence who, unlike Icarus, can fly for real! A John Arden might read him as the contrast between the Roman (and eventually Christian) rectilinear Englishman versus the Celtic but curvilinear Irishman who would never dream of seeing life as he shortest distance between two points.

Manley, of course, combines both the English and the Irish. His technique is fundamentally watercolour, albeit rinsed in mixed-media techniques. His palette was clearly influenced by Irish exemplars: the dry spare and pale washes of a T.P Flanagan; the sombre yet rich staining of a Neil Shawcross (another Englishman, though long resident in Ireland) and the pantheistic spirit of place that characterises a painter whom Manley knew well - Colin Middleton - clearly chimed the younger man. One can however place him, without undue strain, in the English watercolour tradition, though it is the transformative visionary lineage of Blake, Palmer and Turner, rather than the Anglo-Dutch style of a De Wint, the latter being too tranquil, still and quotidian for his taste. But whereas Palmer for instance creates a dream of Paradise, landscapes invested with fecund Christian symbolism, Manley creates seascapes or shorescapes, which have a distinctly pagan ambience. These daydreaming visions (the artist freeing his subconscious, overcoming Christian suppression?) are charged with the observed bleak detail of an Anglo-Saxon seafaring poem: the vigorous action of wing, wind and water. In Sweeney Diving the lone figure is surrounded by a swirl of gannets, diving like spitfires, coasting on the wind, banking or hungrily extending a beak in search of food. In Sweeney Fishing, which draws upon Manley's memories of being on a trawler when mackerel swirled around whitebait, the sombre sea-green tonalities are splendidly offset by the swirling rotation of the mackerel, light glinting on their bellies.

Manley's Sweeney is an odd combination of anchorite and Tarzan: penitential pain and naked pleasure. He exists in a narrative, though it's a narrative which has been pared back; one in which the spectator - as in so much modern fiction - has to make the connections and construct the pathways. Rather than decoding the Christian symbolism, as with Palmer, a Manley work functions as an overall image, as a metaphor or iconic image for states of mind; stages in the journey through life; for a pilgrimage which has no destination other than death. The titles of the six Sweeney works indicate the spare narrative of this pilgr

It is, of course, a pilgrimage with its fair share of pleasures. Sweeney Resting transforms a barren volcanic crag into a bed of plump guillemots, resting and nesting in downy. profusion. On the right of the image we have by contrast the soaring restless activity of the gulls. Sharp scrakes of black ink give a dark powerful energy to the birds whereas Sweeney himself, an amorphous seated presence, is like a moonlit reflection. The overall silvery tonalities (Palmer again) are striking, but look carefully and you'll see flecks of dull red, not to mention the raw and burnt umber used to depict the immature birds for, unlike Palmer but like Turner, Manley is an artist who knows nature in the raw and whose work intimately reflects this knowledge.

Technically he is much more complex than might at first appear. The wax-resist paper doesn't absorb much, so the paint dries on the surface, ridging and cockling, giving a three dimensional presence and thus a multitude of facets for the light to bounce off. Watercolour, then body paint is applied (note the 'negative' shapes of the gannets in Diving for instance), then more watercolour. Perhaps crayon or ink or gouache - the lightly scribbled ink suggests a reminiscence of one of his favourite painters, Dufy - will bring elements into sharp focus. Look as well at the ranges of textures that can effortlessly appear as in variations on the theme of black for Ailsa Craig in Sweeney Surviving as well as the deft touches of unexpected humour: one bird pecking Sweeney's arse while another tries to wrench away Sweeney's fish.

The Sweeney series, of course, is on a part of a large and extensive oeuvre which ranges from close-up depictions of flowers and flowering shrubs to full-scale views of mountain, meadow, shoreline and sea. Incursions have been made into politically-charged explorations of the environment, usually with an undertow of collage leaching through from behind the central image. Manley, straddling English and Irish traditions, and playing on the cusps of the traditional and the innovative, is at the height of his powers.

Exhibition commentary by Brian McAvera - 1999

ee also

*List of Northern Irish artists

External links

* [http://www.rockcliffegallery.co.uk/artists_detail.asp?artistID=41 Rockcliffe Gallery]
* [http://www.ruaonline.com/RUA%20associate%20James%20Manley.htm Royal Ulster Academy of Arts]
* [http://www.jimmanley.co.uk/ Jims Picture Gallery]

References