VISUAL ARTS:IF YOU SLIP into the Douglas Hyde Gallery in Trinity College Dublin throughout the month of July you'll see something surprising: a room lined with easel paintings, writes Aidan Dunne.
It's true - a venue more usually identified with eclectic sculptural installations is playing host to an exhibition of 10 paintings and 25 drawings, all modest in scale and, rather than being grouped in clusters or left leaning against the wall, as tends to happen these days, they are hung in a conventional sequence at even intervals.
The artist is American painter Thomas Nozkowski, a bluff, strongly built man with an amiable manner, an easy, cadenced way of speaking, and an air of being generally amused by things. As well he might.
Nozkowski was born in Teaneck, New Jersey, in 1944 and attended the Cooper Union school of art in New York City from 1961, thereafter taking a leisurely six years to graduate, as he notes wryly. He's been working as a painter and a teacher ever since (he and his wife, sculptor Joyce Robins, live in High Falls, New York), though it is only relatively recently that he has sprung to a new level of prominence in the art world. It's almost the old story of becoming an overnight success after 30 years in the business.
"One good thing about that," he observes, "is that I don't think I can get rattled now. I've seen how other people manage, or haven't managed, the art world. It gives, but it can also take away."
Not that Nozkowski has lived in obscurity during his career to date. He has an extensive exhibition track record, features in numerous private and public collections, and has been well-regarded critically and professionally - but he has always approached things on his own terms.
"I've pursued a regular practice, five hours a day in the studio, producing about 12 paintings a year," he says.
He cites a remark made by the painter, Elizabeth Murray, who died last year: "She said the main thing is to be happy in the studio, and it really struck me as being profound and profoundly simple. If you've got that, you're doing something right."
His first solo show came at the relatively late age of 35. He had by then decided on a methodology that he still adheres to. For more than three decades he has worked on a small scale, when all the while museums and collectors were clamouring for larger and larger pieces. His paintings are stubbornly personal in subject matter as well as scale, and they engage with viewers on a one-to-one basis, rather than being big public pronouncements.
One significant turning point was when curator Robert Storr invited him to show in the Italian pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale, and then devoted a generous room to his work. For many people, this show was one of the highlights of the biennale, and a revelation. The paintings were approachable and user-friendly, and didn't disdain an element of humour, but they were also unmistakably serious and rigorously made. They were unabashedly based on the premise that painting is equal to dealing with contemporary experience, a view notably at variance with that of large sections of the art world.
All Nozkowski's paintings derive from personal experience, though he doesn't spell out the moments or events that initiate them. At various stages he's indicated some of the myriad possibilities: a chance conversation, a book or even a newspaper article, something glimpsed in passing, a detail in a Renaissance painting - all feature together with more conventionally substantial material. Whatever the source, it is translated into painterly form via a process that is, more often than not, protracted. He'll have a year's worth of paintings on the go at any one time, and any of them might take more than a year to conclude, "though some bless me by rushing to completion in three months", he says.
Things are not simply depicted in them. The direct visual connection may consist of a single motif, or a structural principle, or a set of colours. It feels as if, for Nozkowski, to begin a painting is to embark on an argument that must be doggedly pursued to its conclusion, wherever it may lead. That's important, because he says he always follows the painting, and never consciously diverts or changes its course.
Generally speaking, we can recognise the kind of pictorial language he uses, although there is a huge amount of variation in the appearance of his paintings, because he doesn't adhere to a particular signature style in the usual sense of the term. What we recognise is the use of such elements as the grid, patterns in several guises, families of forms both geometric and organic and the interplay between figure and ground.
Nozkowski discusses it in these terms: "My starting points are in the real world, and the problem in each case is how to make a picture in the real world, relating to that starting point, so each painting is an attempt to solve that problem. I hope the starting point grows in terms of its implications as the picture progresses."
Process is vital. "Paint itself is really important to me. As I work with it as a material, it begins to speak back to me with all kinds of connections and associations."
Part of the appeal of his work is the way he uses many familiar elements to produce something that is oddly unfamiliar. It breaks the rules, is open to paradox and contradictions, and is willing to be inconsistent and inconclusive in terms of the meanings imputed to it.
At the same time, Nozkowski says: "I feel certain that my paintings should be autonomous objects. They are self-contained. You don't need a title , you don't need me to tell you about them. Everything you need is there for you to see."
• Thomas Nozkowski: Paintings and Drawings, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College Dublin, until July 24
