Limerick Exhibition remembers, David Lilburn and Jim Savage

 

Lines That Outlive Us

Limerick remembers David Lilburn and Jim Savage

Connemara Landscape by Jim Savage

Two faces look out from the exhibition leaflet. David Lilburn’s self-portrait is a restless gathering of lines, hair escaping in every direction, the face emerging through an intricate web of marks. Beside him, Jim Savage appears in browns and ochres, his features built from patches of light and shadow. Neither image offers the polished reassurance of a publicity photograph. These are artists looking hard at themselves and leaving us something more interesting than a likeness.

They make a compelling introduction to Cuimhniodh (remembered), the exhibition at Limerick City Gallery of Art bringing together work by Lilburn and Savage. Running until 8 November, it offers an opportunity to consider two substantial contributions to the artistic life of this city and beyond.

There is an unavoidable sadness in seeing their dates: Lilburn, 1950–2021; Savage, 1950–2019. Both were born in the same year. Yet the work gives us somewhere else to begin. A memorial records that someone lived. An exhibition allows their questions, habits of observation and particular ways of seeing to remain active among us.

Where the line begins

Drawing was central to both artists. That might sound an unremarkable thing to say about people who made pictures, but drawing has often been treated as preparation: the sketch before the painting, the notebook before the supposedly finished statement.

For Lilburn and Savage, it was a primary practice, deserving attention in its own right. Both also advocated its importance within art making, particularly in relation to printmaking. This exhibition places that commitment alongside their work as collaborators, publishers and curators, with examples across drawing, printmaking and painting.

There is something wonderfully direct about a drawn mark. It carries evidence of a decision, sometimes a hesitation, sometimes a sudden certainty. We can follow it with our eyes and almost imagine the hand travelling across the surface. Even an unfamiliar subject can become approachable through that recognition.

Limerick has good reason to value such work. An artistic community depends on people willing to keep looking, making and sharing what they discover, long after the novelty has worn off.

Lilburn’s restless eye

Lilburn studied at Trinity College Dublin, in Urbino and at Limerick School of Art and Design. His practice centred on drawing and printmaking, exploring memory, identity and place. He exhibited in Ireland and internationally, building a body of work in which technical accomplishment served a searching intelligence.

His self-portrait, reproduced in the leaflet, rewards a second look. The apparent unruliness of the marks does not prevent recognition; it produces it. The face seems caught in the business of being alive, with all the untidiness that entails. There is no need to invent a mood or attach a private confession to it. The marks themselves provide enough conversation.

Another reproduction, the drypoint Blacksod Bay 1, introduces a different subject while retaining that sense of an image discovered through line. Dark uprights, sweeping marks and open areas give the small reproduction an arresting energy. It invites the viewer to examine how a place can be suggested without every inch being explained. For readers and writers, that economy has a familiar appeal. A successful image, like a good poem, can leave space for the person encountering it.

Savage’s ground

Savage’s training took him through Manchester School of Art, Chelsea College of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art in London. He moved to Ireland in 1982 and taught at Limerick School of Art and Design until his retirement in 2016.

That is a considerable stretch of a working life given to teaching. Alongside the work an artist leaves behind, there is the less easily catalogued influence of a classroom: an observation offered at the right moment, a standard insisted upon, a student encouraged to persevere. The gallery walls can represent only part of that contribution.

Savage became known for large, meticulously detailed landscape drawings. Connemara Landscape, a mixed media work on paper, shows rocky ground, low vegetation and distant mountains. Its interest extends across the foreground. The eye has stones and rough terrain to negotiate before it reaches the horizon.

Anyone accustomed to the west will recognise the temptation to look immediately towards the mountains. Here, the nearer ground asks for its share of attention. There is plenty to occupy us before we arrive at the grand view.

When poetry met print

The connection between these artists went beyond a shared respect for drawing. Together they founded Occasional Press to publish projects involving art and poetry. That undertaking deserves particular attention in a city whose cultural life includes so many encounters between the written word and the visual image.

Publishing gives collaboration a physical form. A page can bring different imaginations into proximity while allowing each its own character. The reader turns it, pauses and returns. The scale of the encounter becomes personal.

Their collaborative activities included the Connemara Project with Ballynahinch Castle, inviting poets and visual artists to respond to the Atlantic landscape. Associated collaborators included Dorothy Cross, Donald Teskey, Tony Curtis, Joe Wilson, Colm Tóibín and Mick O’Dea.

The names indicate the range of the company involved, but the underlying invitation is equally interesting. Give several artists a place to consider and the responses will differ. One may attend to a contour, another to a phrase, another to the difficult relationship between memory and what lies before the eye.

Such projects make room for discovery between disciplines. They also require the practical generosity of people prepared to bring others together and see an idea through to publication.

A city’s living memory

The exhibition acknowledges the support of Romi van Son Lilburn, Sarah O’Flaherty Savage and their families, with loans from the University of Limerick Collection and private collectors. Behind an exhibition of this kind are people who have kept work safe and made it available for others to encounter.

A visit also offers a useful change of pace. We see so many pictures now that looking can become a hurried act of recognition before the next image arrives. In a gallery, a single work can hold its ground. You can move closer, step back and test your first impression. With artists for whom drawing mattered so deeply, that extra time seems appropriate. Their work gives the eye something to do beyond simply registering a subject and moving on.

For Limerick, the invitation is simple: go and look. There is no entrance charge and no requirement to arrive armed with the language of art criticism. Begin with a face, a stretch of landscape or whatever catches your attention.

Cuimhniodh (remembered) continues at Limerick City Gallery of Art, Carnegie Building, Pery Square, until 8 November. Two artists are gone. Their work still has visitors to meet.