Opening

I was delighted when an old acquaintance and work-colleague, Stephen Rinn, asked me to say a few words at the opening of a new exhibition of his work, in the Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin. I didn't have much time as my wife is off in Seoul for the week and the wean is really too tired to drag into town in the evening. Good to meet my old pal, Polly at the show, and I think the speech went well. Here's an abbreviated version (though I kept it short anyway):

Stephen Rinn is a painter. Stating the obvious, of course. But art and painting have long ago ceased to be synonymous, or even to necessarily occupy the same broad arena. He was a painter when I met him for the first time, some 24 years ago, when we worked together in Bray, and I am delighted to see he is still a painter. His paintings in the 90s were largely landscapes, in particular cityscapes I think. I remember the energy, and that he loved red.

These abstracts are both completely different and not so different at all. They retain the energy and freshness, and have something of Paul Klee’s loose, playful way with geometric forms and simple graphic shapes, charts, graphs, etc. Stephen has said that he’s been interested in painting since he was eight and that it’s become part of his identity, which it clearly has. I love his description of the process from idea to execution. ‘I could be walking along the street’, he says, ‘there would be an object on the ground or a shape or pattern’… ‘and you look at it again and say “I must come back to that spot; I saw something there.”

That’s a perfect description of what art is all about: seeing things. And as a photographer I know exactly what he means, the main difference being that one can take of photograph of that shape or pattern instantly, like a visual quotation, whereas painting, as John Berger said, is about translations from reality.