Paul Yates has been painting and writing for over four decades, most of it quietly, from a converted eighteenth-century hay barn on the Glentoran estate in County Antrim. He lets the work speak — he doesn't even sign his canvases with his name, only a small rune-like cypher, having decided long ago that a signature intrudes on a composition.
So it means a great deal to us that on Friday at 2pm he'll be here in person, in our gallery on Callender Street, with the work on the walls around him.
Why it's a studio sale
The name is literal. Next year a French gallerist, Isabelle de Botton, is establishing an art foundation in France where Yates's paintings, poetry and films will go on permanent display. The contents of his present studio are being crated and dispatched there. Yates himself will continue as Artist in Residence at the Wilder Townhouse Hotel in Dublin.
What that means in plain terms is this: the work in our gallery is leaving the country, and once it goes, it isn't coming back. This is the last time a body of studio work by Paul Yates will be available in Belfast.
If you want to see the place it all came from, this is the film — the hay barn, the lofts, the courtyard, the work stacked against the walls, and Yates reading over the top of it. The room you're looking at is being emptied.
Who he is, for those who don't know the name
Born in Belfast in 1954, Yates came to attention at sixteen, when his poems were chosen for broadcast on BBC Radio Ulster. He'd been encouraged by his school English teacher — the painter Jack Pakenham, a leading figure in the Royal Ulster Academy — and by eighteen he was hanging his first solo show at the Tom Caldwell Gallery. His first collection of poems and drawings, White Cat with a Human Face, appeared in 1974.
He has never worked in one discipline. In 1992 he made Masters of the Canvas for BBC 2, an award-winning documentary later screened again as part of the Tate's Art in the Sixties exhibition. His long-running friendship and collaboration with Basil Blackshaw produced Dunadry Banks in 1995, published in support of UNICEF, and the limited edition Mourne in 2005 — Yates's poems set alongside Blackshaw's images.
It was Blackshaw who first put Yates in front of Lord Glentoran, and who encouraged the patronage and the studio facilities that have sustained his work for over fifteen years. Lord Glentoran remembers the two men as near-daily visitors to the house, and the pair of them talking about art and everything else.
What's on the walls
Figures, mostly — heads and half-lengths built up in thick, scumbled paint, faces assembled out of marks that seem almost accidental until you step back. Blues and sage greens and dirty ochres. There is something of the puppet or the icon about them, and something entirely their own.
Many of these have never been exhibited. Some were studies for larger paintings. Some, as Yates puts it, were experiments of chance. If you have only ever seen his finished work in a catalogue, seeing the studies is a different experience altogether — you can watch him thinking.
Duchamp's Imaginary Girlfriend
Man Drawing Chalk Circles
Tinkers with Ties
Pot Head Scarecrow, Ronda, Spain
Dripping Snowman
Anonymous Score for Aeolian Symphony
The bradburyART connection
I'll be honest about why this exhibition is here rather than somewhere else. Paul has bought his materials from us throughout his career — canvas, oils, pigment, advice across the counter about what would do what. That's the whole of it. Forty-odd years of a working artist coming through the door of a shop, and a shop knowing what he needed.
It's because of that long association that he's given us access to original works from his studio for this exhibition, and it's why he's agreed to come in on Friday. We don't take it lightly.
Coming along
Paul Yates, Studio Sale — meet the artist, Friday 7 August, 2pm to 3pm, in the gallery at 4 Callender Street, Belfast.
No ticket, no booking, no charge. Come up the stairs and have a look. The exhibition runs alongside everything else happening in the city for the Fleadh, so if you're in town anyway, put your head in.
If you'd like to see what's still available before Friday, the collection is online — but I'd say the paint is worth seeing in person. Photographs flatten it.
