
Paths Not Taken: Jerome and Marsyas

When studying painting in Italy in my twenties, my home was an attic room in a convent run by Irish nuns. The convent was called San Girolamo (or Saint Jerome) and images and statues of the saint were everywhere. He also appeared in churches and museums round about, and I became fascinated with his depiction by Renaissance artists: an an old hermit in the wilderness, writing or reading or lost in contemplation. The real Jerome (Doctor of the Church and translator of the Latin Bible) wasn’t half as interesting to me as his mythologised image (typically with friendly lion) which seemed to become an artistic sub-genre in its own right. I particularly loved the Jeromes of Bellini, Leonardo, Pontormo and Ribera. Finding a suitably ancient life-model, I thought I’d have a go myself and see what I could add to the collection.

My ‘Marsyas’ had a similar beginning: profoundly impacted by ‘Flaying of Marsyas’ images by Raphael, Titian and Ribera, and by the ancient myth itself with its themes of beauty and suffering (Marsyas is, in a sense, the original tortured artist!) I set to the task – brashly! impudently! – of doing my own version, trying not to be intimidated by the greatness if my predecessors.

At this stage in my artistic development I was aiming to emulate the Old Masters in a very straight-forward way; looking at what they did and trying to do the same (or do it better), producing work that added to the tradition or ‘continued the conversation’ by adding a new perspective. I was also trying to find the limits of what was possible today. Having been discouraged from emulating the Old Masters at art college and told that the forms of art I loved were ‘dead’, I thought I’d ignore that advice, do the opposite and see where it got me.
A ‘masterpiece’ was originally a work made by a young painter to demonstrate mastery and gain admission as a professional to the artists’ guild. Successful applicants would henceforth be recognised as master-painters. In this sense, Jerome and Marsyas were consciously intended by me as ‘masterpieces.’ However, for me there was no guild to enter and my beloved masters were, indeed, mostly dead. In essence I was submitting work to dead artists and imagining their feedback. It’s said that you can’t argue with the dead, but I did, and in my mind they argued back. This obviously has its funny side, but I don’t think trying to learn from and hold myself to the standards of dead artists is entirely a fool’s erand. I actually learned a lot! Ultimately, I think I got a pass from the dead guys (making some allowances for the desultoriness of my education, the fact that I was never really apprenticed and trained in the old-fashioned sense). Whatever the limits of my technique, it looked to me like my ambition and seriousness were clear and that these pictures could be judged ‘masterpieces’ in the original, limited sense. I showed what I could do, and I could do a lot.

Among the living, however, the response to these works was much more complicated: they earned me applause from some quarters but incomprehension, dismissal or outright hostility from others.
One problem, I quickly discovered, was that the vast majority of people (and far more among the educated than I imagined possible) didn’t know who Jerome or Marsyas were. They didn’t know their stories or the paintings they’d appeared in, or the meanings they’d acquired over the ages. Even among those with a significant interest in visual art there are few enough today who can decode Renaissance symbolism or recognise the old mythological stories without a helping hand. I had trained as an art historian and immersed myself in the language of Renaissance painting and its accompanying religious and philosophical culture. Loving the stuff so much, I imagined an audience of people like me, but that audience (it turned out) was rather limited. This isn’t a problem for many artists: some even take pride in the idea of their work appealing to a small minority. But it troubled me. I didn’t want to be elitist or esoteric. I wanted to reach people, to share my joy, to communicate. Painting, to me, is a language.
Was my idea of being part of an ongoing humanistic conversation across the ages essentially absurd? What was the point in painting gods and heroes that nobody now believed in? Could I escape a dry, sterile academicism by deploying my skills and knowledge in a different way? Who was I actually painting for, if not the living? If hardly anyone today knew the story of Marsyas but everyone knew the story of Batman, would I not be better off painting Batman? Might he be closer to the mythology and religion of our time?

Beyond incomprehension there was also hostility. Back in 2003 when I exhibited these and several other Renaissance-inspired pictures with broadly religious themes, I was surprised by the outright hostility of many viewers. At the time, Ireland was changing quickly from a staunchly Catholic country to an essentially post-Christian one, and the vanguard in this transformation was vehemently anti-Catholic and anti-clerical. Some of them really disliked these paintings and seemed to view them as an affront to modern secular values and the embodiment of conservative reaction. They thought I was betraying the Modernist or Enlightenment project and attempting to revive an art of superstition and religious martyrdom.

Until that point I’d been reluctant to talk about my work, sticking to an “it’s there in front of you: what you see is what you get” philosophy. When I saw that people might not ‘get’ it at all, or not have the tools to understand what I was doing, and were capable of grossly misconstruing my intentions, I realised I had to start talking – and fast! The result is ultimately these essays and this book.
While I remain inspired by Renaissance art, I have sought since to extract what I love in it from the outward forms of its dead or dying religions. To that extent, Marsyas and Jerome, as straightforward renditions of the the old stories, represent a path of more conventional or academic expression, a road not taken.

I still see myself as a figurative painter in the European tradition, attempting to maintain my craft at the highest level, using paint to explore issues of truth, meaning and value. All my paintings are, in some sense, attempted answers to the three questions in the title of Gauguin’s famous painting:
Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?
My art is still founded upon a study of nature because, for me, nature is the source of all life, all beauty, all our wealth. An art based on observation is still vital, in my opinion, because as a species we are bad witnesses, prone to deluding ourselves. The test of faithfully observing and recording helps keep us grounded in reality.

The human image is central to my work because I believe we need images of ourselves to gain self-understanding; to comprehend our relationships with each other and with the wider world.
Cennino Cennini said that painting ‘calls for imagination, and skill of hand, in order to discover things not seen, hiding themselves under the shadow of natural objects … presenting to plain sight what does not actually exist’. I am still essentially committed to image-making as Cennino defined it 600 years ago. But whereas Cennino could paint a Crucifixion or a Madonna and find in that image the highest embodiment of meaning, value and purpose for his society, our society lacks true ‘icons’ that embody widely shared ideas of what is most meaningful, most sacred.

My response to this situation has been to go back to my own first principles, back to nature and the human form, to the works of art I love the most, but also forward to embrace current ideas of where we’re heading as a species and what makes life meaningful today. Drawing on all these resources, I’m painting new images that can embody my own convictions and uncertainties, in the hope that they find a response and strike a chord with others.
Although the work may still appear quite traditional at times, my engagement with the various traditions and sources I draw upon is closer in spirit to salvage and retrieval. I’ve tried to retain some of the primal substance (so to speak) but translated and mythologically updated. I’m using the old language to communicate something more specific to our time, engaging with current political and environmental issues, sometimes using low-brow and pop-culture references. I see this as contributing to the endless project of creating value and meaning anew, to which every generation must contribute.
– Conor Walton, 2024