The National Gallery of Ireland’s exhibition of the work of Jack B Yeats, soon to conclude, is most encouraging for those who feel that they have yet to fulfil their creative potential. The artist made many of his most avant garde works when he was in his 70s and 80s, a period in which he was also at his most prolific as an oil painter. As an artist, he ended up worlds away from the young man he’d been in 1905, producing sketches for the Manchester Guardian to illustrate JM Synge’s pioneering articles on the appalling poverty suffered by the inhabitants of rural Connemara and Mayo. Over time, his style loosened and dissolved into near abstraction – though he never abandoned elements of figuration. By the end, he was no longer working from observation, but from memory.
Memory is fallible. Family members will remember the same incidents differently, and describe them using different words. Eyewitness accounts often vary. Memory is slippery and dangerous, but that is also what makes it such a profoundly important creative tool. Where would Paula Rego be without her self-consciously faulty use of memory, one that verges on mythologisation, in an oeuvre that draws so deeply on her childhood? The point for her is not accurate, photographic recall, but memory used almost as a dreamscape, to be visited to harvest artistic material. James Joyce’s reconstruction of Dublin in Ulysses, published a century ago this year, relishes precisely recalled topographical details – but he used memory to alienate himself from his native city, so that he could re-render it as the epic canvas for his masterpiece of modernism.
