Mick Rooney Exhibition

Monday February 20, 2017

Mick Rooney RA Exhibition: ‘Forests of the Night and Other Tales’

Private View: Sunday 5th March 2017.
The Exhibition continues until Saturday 25th March 2017.

The winter of the March 1947 was severe, especially on the fifth when I sat alone in grannies Jarrow scullery gazing at the blizzard of great snowflakes cascading past the window. I was waiting for cake – birthday cake.

From the ruins of victory of World War Two a phoenix arose in the form of free education for all and it was on the anvil of optimism I was forged.

I know no other life than that of being some sort of painter. Of course, these days, though the worlds museums are stuffed to the gunwales with paintings; the exclusive cognoscenti have relegated painting to the cul-de-sacs of their neo-cathedral crypts. So, you toiling collectors and Amateurs are more than ever the custodians or the pigmented rectangle.

What are six decades to The History of Art?-save that in those years my work has appeared and dispersed.

All of us have a story to tell, but the present moves us relentlessly on into the future. It is the here and now that matters.

So, what is going on in the Night Kitchen? What is diaphanous innocence doing on tables, conjuring up trumpeting menageries of mist? Remember when you crept downstairs in the small hours?

Tanterlizingly behind the vitrine a figure gazes onto a strangely lit tableau of artifacts. So much lies behind glass-Aquaria, Vivaria, feather, fur and fin.

I hope that you might regard some of my images as secular icons. There are painted screens from which pelt-clad performers peep out. Figures stand before the screens. There is dense pattern and high decoration everywhere.

Life is pattern, is air, is mist. Suddenly it feels good to knit with paint. Only clear the mind (not that hard these days) until colour and shape lie beside each other. The subject matter is secondary to the intuitive need to spend time with paint.

We are these days part of electronic screen culture. Each moment we may exist with varying degrees of Pixelation.

At our fingertips in a microsecond we can witness-Appalachian clog dancing. The life cycle of the dengue mosquito or learn how the Quark got its name.

While many struggle, as they age, with loss of memory, I seem to be in the conscious process of emptying out. More than ever I desire to paint only what remains of my day. Of course this is a conceit because up there in the attic, things still go bump.

By the way, at the easel, I occasionally go into a swoon for a few seconds and awake up to find the loaded paintbrush has slid brightly and vertically down the canvas.

This, I feel could be a way forward to a new art movement called The Narcolepticists.

Now where did I put those Oligarchs phone numbers?