'The business of looking...'

Diarmuid Kelley likes painting the human figure and he likes painting things. When you are young and British, at the end of the twentieth century - and he is just twenty-six -this sort of activity can get you into trouble. A friend of mine at a major London art school in 1969 was told: 'This won't do, you know, painting all these people. You will have to leave.' Little has changed since then, and Kelley's is a generation that is trained in the 'correct', non-figurative, strait-jacket of the modernist art school. It takes guts to win through. 'I painted still-lifes', Kelley recalls (and he paints them superbly), 'because it was a way out of the problem where, at the Chelsea School of Art, they branded you as a sentimental booby if you did anything that wasn't "conceptual". With still-lifes I could isolate the business of looking - and with no hint of "interpretation".'

I like that phrase, 'the business of looking'...The life class, however, so central to this endeavour, is dying or dead in most of our art colleges, whatever flashy gloss is put on the situation by the art establishment's creepy 'spin-doctors'. It began to be killed off in the '60s by the same iconoclasts who, for example, urged their students to chuck all the classical plaster casts into the river at Hereford; or who, in grander London establishments, gleefully assisted in hurling similar treasures to destruction from four floors up. It marked a cataclysmic break with the continuous, millennium-old, tradition of teaching the craft of art.

For this and other reasons, Chelsea was unsatisfactory, but in his earlier time as a student, at Newcastle, Kelley was lucky enough to receive what he describes as a 'thorough' training, although it was only towards the end that he found lie simply had to work from the live model. 'Photography is not enough for what I want to do. I didn't actually want to work from the model but, in order to produce the images I wanted, I found that I had to.' Those images possess what he describes as 'an intimation of narrative'. Like so many good painters, Kelley's studio is littered with postcards and cutout images, to which he refers in his own pictures. His figures carry within them visual echoes, especially, he says, of martyred saints: 'I'd like to do large-scale religious paintings but they'd look hideously precious and so I introduce that more subtly.' His heroes are Velązquez and Caravaggio, and he thinks big, but Diarmuid Kelley has the talent and, rarer still in a painter, the intellect, to justify it.

Genius? Diarmuid Kelley certainly takes infinite pains: in posing the model, in drawing and in re-working. 'I have to work through things quite a lot to get it right. I use drawings especially for compositions, because they are so important.' Now, when did you last hear that from a young artist today? 'I'd like my paintings to appear effortless', Kelley says, 'which, sadly, they do not.' I'm not so sure. And besides, the effort that is visible is beautiful in itself.

Robin Simon

June 1998