Saturday, February 6, 2010

My hero /Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín

 


My hero Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín

Colm Tóibín
Saturday 6 February 2010

I

n his short poem "The Last", Thomas Kinsella catches a late glimpse of two towering figures in Dublin – the political leader Eamon de Valera and the painter Jack Yeats. "Standing stone still on the path, with a long pale chin / under a broad-brimmed hat, and aged eyes / staring down Baggot Street across his stick. / Jack Yeats. The last."

Yeats, who died in 1957, was the younger brother of the poet WB Yeats. He dedicated his life to the most difficult and intractable issue – the instability of Irish light. He saw its swirling, cloud-laden movements as pure gift. He loved anything that moved and relished crowds and gatherings. He loved theatres, horses, circuses, swimmers, the wild sea. But he also paid homage to the drama of the isolated individual, all the more alone because of his use, both frenzied and disciplined, of competing colour and thick pigment.

I like how Yeats was both serious draughtsman and expressionist dreamer as he wandered in the streets with the world in the grip of his gaze. In the letters of Beckett or the diaries of Lady Gregory, he comes across as polite, engaging, modest, mysterious. I love the idea that he never in his life discussed anything that was of great private concern to him. There were too many other things to talk about or look at, it seemed. As a painter, he went his own way, paying no attention to fashion, and became an example to the painters who followed him in Ireland, heroic figures too, such as Patrick Collins, Basil Blackshaw, Camille Souter and Barrie Cooke.

There is a long room in the National Gallery in Dublin dedicated to his work and that of his father and his sisters. This is one of the sacred spaces in Dublin for me. I don't think I would have been interested in meeting him, but I would love to have seen him, as Kinsella did, on the street, and sometimes as I wander around here I imagine I do see him and that his gaze is as sharp and all-embracing as ever.

THE GUARDIAN





2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler 
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser
007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville
011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm

2010

017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey

036 My hero / Robert Lowell by Jonathan Raban
037 My hero / Beryl Bainbridge by Michael Holroyd
038 My hero / Charles Schulz by Jenny Colgan
039 My hero / Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds
040 My hero / Annie Proulx by Alan Warner

041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal

2011
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan
100 Thomas Tranströmer by Robin Robertson
102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill

2012

190 My hero / Iris Murdoch by Charlotte Mendelson
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer

2015
2016


Posted by at
Labels: , , , , , ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)