Phoebe Donovan, Lithographs highlights the work of a north Wexford artist who is perhaps less well-known than she deserves to be. Donovan, who died three years ago, aged 96, was a fine painter and printmaker whose career spanned most of the 20th century. Apart from building a reputation for herself as a portrait painter, she was a founder member of the Graphic Studio in Dublin, managed Carley's Bridge Pottery for several years and consistently exhibited her own work.
The Wexford Arts Centre show is devoted to her lithographic work and demonstrates her fluency in the medium. Her prints reveal an artist with a highly developed sense of design and great feeling for form and colour. Donovan came to print relatively late, when she had settled in Dublin in the late 1940s, and she clearly brought her carefully nurtured skills as a painter to bear on the lithographic process. Un-showy and self-contained, her lithographs have a quiet, understated strength.
The process obviously suited her. An acute observer of plants, she excelled at pinpointing distinguishing details, and the exhibition features many outstanding studies of individual species. Her Snow- drops, for example, are conjured up from a suitably chilly mixture of cold blues and greens framing the white petals. Her pale Daffodils brilliantly captures the flowers' papery textures and delicate coloration. She was not a botanical artist per se, and always conveys an atmospheric sense of the plants as seen in their wild or garden habitats.
Various other studies, including those of a cluster of oak leaves with acorns, of pale tulips, of honeysuckle, peony flowers, a bank of wild flowers and a single olive tree are all beautiful pieces of pictorial design, characterised by a sure grasp of the economic layering of translucent lithographic inks and by meticulous, subtle observation and description. That Donovan wasn't only a miniaturist in terms of subject matter is demonstrated by her Rooks, in which the birds scatter wildly from a far-flung mass of tree branches, and by an excellent, evocative view of Tourette, a mountain town in the South of France - where she spent her summers.
As the work tends to suggest, her familiarity with plants and landscape was heartfelt and extended back to her earliest years. She was born into a Wexford farming family, and grew up with a fondness for nature and life outdoors. She had a practical grasp of farming, and worked at it to raise money for her own art education. And she remained an enthusiastic horsewoman, punctuating her year with hunting in the early months, when the poor light allowed her little scope for painting.
When she was growing up, art was a perfectly acceptable activity for young women - up to a point. The Dublin Metropolitan School of Art (the precursor to today's NCAD) which she attended, was widely regarded as a kind of finishing school for young ladies who, as expectation had it, would go on to find suitable prospects for husbands, marry and have children. But from the first, Donovan nurtured an ambition to devote herself to artistic production. Though, because of other, practical commitments, she attended part-time, she did so with a rare sense of purpose and determination.
Of course, she was not alone in her aspiration to work as an artist. As it happens, independent-minded women occupy a central role in the history of Irish art throughout the 20th century, usually in the forefront of aesthetic development.
Donovan's relative obscurity may derive not so much from artistic conservatism - she wasn't really on the academic side of the artistic divide in Ireland - as from her determined individuality. It is true that, unlike Mainie Jellett, Evie Hone, or her friends Elizabeth Rivers and Nora McGuinness, she didn't really embrace a version of Modernism - though as the Wexford show demonstrates, she did embark on some modest experiments in that general direction. Still, an ex-student of Sean Keating, whose portraiture classes she attended, naturalistic observation remained the touchstone of her method, and her approach to portraiture retained his influence. She also seems, it should be said, to have been innately modest and unpushy.
While her experience of plants and animals was garnered at home in Ballymore, the practicalities, as well as the background of country life, formed an important strand of her subject matter. In the 1940s, with apparently typical equanimity, she took over the management of Carley's Bridge Pottery before, later, moving to settle in Dublin. There she eventually found herself an extraordinary eyrie in the form of a three-storey house perched high on Dalkey Hill, surrounded by trees and boasting stunning views over the sea. She made the top floor her studio, and this elevation accounts for her otherwise puzzling images of tree tops. Examples turn up in the Wexford show. There is a certain Oriental, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon quality to these compositions, rendered from this hillside perch, in which the wind-whipped tree tips are viewed against generous expanses of sky.
Liam Miller of the Dolmen Press enlisted Donovan to design book-jackets, which led on to her involvement in the establishment of the Graphic Studio in 1961. It is still a thriving group studio for printmakers in Dublin. Over the last few decades, there have been many exhibitions, notably in Dublin, Cork and Kilkenny, designed to explore and publicise the work of Irish women artists who were, for one reason or another, relatively underappreciated. In this context, it is gratifying to see a regional arts centre so usefully highlighting the work of a locally born artist.
Phoebe Donovan, Lithographs can be seen at The Print Gallery, Wexford Arts Centre, Cornmarket, Wexford, until April 30th. Tel: 053-23764. A permanent display of her work can be seen at Ballymore Historic Features Visitor Centre, near Camolin, Co Wexford, which opens at Easter and runs daily from Whitsun to mid-September.
