Haltons latest project progressing inch by inch

Damian McCarney

“They’re actually canvasses,” Pauline Halton confirms of what looks like an overgrown stamp collection carefully laid out before us on a petite table. “They are tiny - they’re an inch by an inch. I’ve done 100 so far and I hope to do 200, and maybe have an exhibition some time with them.”
Pauline is a distinctive artist, whose every paint stroke speaks of a joie de vivre. At first glance the spread of tiny canvasses confuse like a pixellated screen. Closer examination reveals common themes in many - sunsets and nocturnes, Pauline’s beautiful cat with its most luxurious fur, flowers of red, white and yellow.
“I think you could explore the possibilities of what to do with them because they are so small.”
She is considering developing the harmony of ideas, by placing numerous canvasses within a single box frame; she’s even toying with the idea of mounting a few mini-canvasses on top of a larger painting, echoing the same colours and themes.
“Well, it was very strange,” notes Pauline of how this latest collection came to be. She had placed an order for small canvases from an online supplier, not fully appreciating their minuscule dimensions until they arrived in the post.
“I said, ‘What will I do with this?’” she recalls, suppressing a laugh that’s never far away. “I didn’t know what to do with them for a long time - then I just sat down and started to paint them. Every one of them is different from the other.”
Pauline agrees that her work is easily identifiable, even beyond the themes she explores.
“I use primary colours all of the time and I use them straight from the tube,” she explains. “And I always start a painting in the middle with red. The painting will grow from the red and it will be balanced by different colours - blues, ultramarine blue or Persian orange would be there, and I would fill the painting and make a composition.”
So even paintings that don’t end up with red in them, do you start with red anyway?
“I really do. I have red in every painting.”
Why red?
“Because it’s so vibrant. I use vermillion red. It brings the painting to life, really.”
“I love red flowers as well. Outside in the spring I’d have red, orange and peach begonias, because I love those colours.”
Many of her paintings testify to this.
Asked to describe her style, after a brief pause she says: “Naive art or magic realism or maybe even just vibrant, bright and colourful.”
Pauline’s honed her technique over the years at various art colleges and with occasional stints at the Annaghmakerrig artists’ retreat. However it seems that a sustained period of inactivity - with regards to art - helped her to develop her painterly voice.
“When I went to college I really had no style, I painted like everybody else. And then I stopped painting for a long while; I went to Dublin to work. And then one day I went out to the garden and I started painting again. I developed this style.”
Would this style have been in you before you received your training?
“No I wouldn’t think so, no I developed that style and kept doing it, and doing it.”
Flicking through exhibition catalogues of some of her work from 2004, interiors featured regularly, and the peculiar perspective brings Van Gogh to mind. Pauline readily admits his influence. “Yes I would be - the way he looks at things and puts it down, his angle in looking at the world. Looking down or up at things rather than straight on.
“I was doing interiors at that time and now I’m doing flora and landscapes so it isn’t as apparent in the new ones. It’s a different angle again.”
She also enthuses how Marc Chagall “would really intrigue me” and Henri Matisse’s tendency to examine subjects through a window, or an opened a door appeals to her outlook - “that way of seeing things, not just straight.”
She agrees that her personality radiates from her work.
“I think it does, I paint when I’m happy - and I can really paint if I’m really happy, and if I’m not, I can’t paint.”
The Celt wondered if some of the orange and purple sunsets did not convey a tension?
“Maybe there is something there but I feel that I put all my happiness into the work.”
Amongst the fabulously happy creations – often created to a soundtrack of Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, Nina Simone - “I’ve painted many an exhibition to them” - are some stand-out pieces. One idyllic scene shows her neighbour Jimmy Reilly walking Bob the horse, with Pauline as a young girl in the saddle. Another shows Ballintemple Church of Ireland as the focal point of a rural idyll. Then there’s the quaint little red gate form her front garden.
“I think I was painting it, and I didn’t know I was painting it. I actually painted it so many times, and I began to realise, where’s that red gate? And I said, “Sure it’s here,” she says with a pure vermillion red laugh.
Pauline’s personal favourite painting?
“It has to be this one!” she says riffling through another book to find a delightful painting of her kitchen when it still belonged to the previous owner, John Brady. The Waterford stove, which takes pride of place in her beautiful cottage, and which lures her away from her purpose built studio to set up her easel in the kitchen, is the star of the painting. This painting gave the exhibition at Dublin’s Jo Rain Gallery its name – ‘John Brady’s stove and the kettle on the boil’.
And did you sell it?
“I did,” she sighs, “it is terrible, and I do miss it,” she says with another burst of infectious laughter.
“If you really love something it is hard to part.”
She is going to endure some heart bruising when her mini-masterpieces find new homes.
For more on Pauline Halton’s work, see www.cavanarts.ie