Beyond the Pools Ian McKeever

Some shift of emphasis can be perceived in the “landscapes” of McKeever from the end of the 1970s. Abandoning the uncalculated prints of nature left in the course of its working, he allowed more scope to the marks of his own gestures. His favourite method was still combining the creative process with long walks, taking photos and making drawings, and elaborating the collected material in the studio.
His series of 1982-84, Traditional Landscapes, preserved the strongly conceptual character of his previous works for a start, but he wished to deviate from it with such “anti-conceptual” features as a sort of romantic tradition of painting. His procedure synthesizes the dual trend of western landscape painting over the past one and a half centuries: the documentarist discoverer with a photographer’s eye and the in-door painter mobilizing his own imagination. The items of the series are far more autonomous pieces one by one than the earlier works. In these pictures, McKeever placed the stress on the spectacular confrontation of various media. The photo enlarged heavily and transferred to the picture space, and withdrawn as medial element, acts as a latent cohesive force. The expressive force of the paint assumes far greater significance as the mediator of the first-hand experience of the landscape via its arbitrary colours and brushwork conveying the painter’s vehement gestures.

Ferenc Tóth