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Patrick Hourihan: George Melly called him an instinctive Surrealist |
Even better than the surreal thing
Patrick Hourihan’s colourful and humorous paintings are the product of an outsider’s rich imagination, writes Fiona Green
I NEVER knew that my early love for Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland would one day lead me to the door of such a fine Surrealist painter.
Patrick Hourihan’s glittering array of pictures, paintings and drawings currently being exhibited at the Highgate Gallery, reveal that the essence of Surrealism is still alive and that Hourihan is the remarkable torch bearer.
Patrick has been working virtually unknown for more than 20 years – “at the service of his imagination, automatically painting” as he describes it.
Raised in an unconventional setting – apart from, yet in daily contact with his mother – Patrick didn’t “mix well” with other children.
His imagination was fed on the literature of Lewis Carroll and the classics, and left to develop unfettered by early schooling.
He never wanted to be part of the mainstream of life, but enjoyed looking at it from the outside. So it was a delight for him to encounter Michael Werner at Watford College, where he went to study art in the mid 1980s.
Michael (or Baron Werner von Alvensleben) was a refugee from Hitler and a serious, dedicated artist.
He was quite unique and had known many of the great Surrealists in Europe. To Patrick he was also “a wizard who saw the wonder of the marvellous behind everyday objects and situations,” although he could also on occasion be “a sacred monster” too.
Before he met Michael, Patrick says his work was “stuck” in some way, but then he learned to value himself and now he works alone, trusting and entirely at the mercy of his own instincts.
The paintings are always hidden while in progress, because he doesn’t want anyone to intrude before completion. It is not unusual to have more than one on the go over a long period.
Like the sculptor Louise Bourgeois, whose magnificent show at Tate Modern he visited recently, Patrick does not paint for an audience, but for himself alone.
He found fans in Conroy Maddox, who bequeathed some fine Surrealist work and papers to him, and George Melly who wrote the introduction and opened his show a decade ago.
Melly, an expert on the subject, described Patrick as an “instinctive Surrealist not a resurrectionist” and drew comparison with the Dadaists of 1916 – artists like Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia whose subject matter shows machinery with vegetation.
In fact, Melly says, the Surrealists disliked machinery (except for cinema which Man Ray, Bunuel and Cocteau used to great effect) “but whenever it appeared, as in the Max Ernst series, it is attacked and overwhelmed by lush vampiric vegetation”.
They are the sources in these paintings, imbued with unnatural colour like strange dreams.
Patrick is a wonderful colourist and humorist, whose work demonstrates that by turning chaotic feeling into orderly metaphor, via “pure psychic automatism”, the spring of personal freedom is found in the unconscious mind.
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