Ecstatic Otherness

If there is one thing Colin Middleton can't abide, it's "this long-haired, corduroy cult of artists." The stocky Irish painter prefers to wear his own hair trimmed short and to roll about Belfast and Dublin in hand-woven tweed plus-fours, red suede shoes and a black beret. His would be a notable figure in any landscape; in Ireland, which has produced hardly any painting worth the name,* Middleton is a current sensation.

A Slick Flop. He had come, it seemed, to an art style of his own after a good many years of following other people's. "At seven," he says, "I was definitely modernistic in outlook. My first painting was rather like a fumbling Matisse." He grew up to paint slick surrealist canvases. When he showed 30 of them in Dublin three years ago, he sold only two or three; when he hauled out more than 100 in his own Belfast, not a one was sold. Middleton supported his wife and three children by working as a damask designer.

Two years ago he made up his mind to "reorient" himself "and start all over again." He quit his designing job, joined a cooperative farm colony in Suffolk, England, and spent a year on the soil. When he got back to Belfast he found he had left his surrealist props under a haystack, along with the prissily smooth painting methods of his past.

He began dashing off somber landscapes and expressionist figure pieces done with color squeezed directly from the tube and applied in rough, hurried strokes.

Inside & Outside. When it came to explaining his new works, the everyday English language could take Irishman Middleton just so far. Teresa, for example (see cut), was "an attempt to portray in paint the personification of the Carrick Hill area--one of the poorer Catholic districts in Belfast. An attempt to feel my way into a particular aspect of Catholic mysticism, essentially Irish." It was an attempt, said he, to show "the ecstatic otherness of relinquishing all because one has nothing at all to relinquish."

The people inside his picture frames looked desperate on the whole, not ecstatic, but people on the outside looking in were generally pleased as Punch. Middleton's exhibition in a Dublin gallery last week sold fast, and moved critics to unaccustomed cheers. Ireland's No. 1 painter, crusty old Jack B. Yeats (brother of the late great Poet William Butler), spent a morning at the show, at last gave his judgment: "It takes 40 years to learn to handle paint like that." Middleton was just 40.

* As even some Irishmen admit. Groping for the reason, Irish Poet George William Russell ("iE") once explained that by the time the art of oil painting had spread to Ireland (from England and the Continent), "the Gaelic spirit was suffering obscuration."

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