In His Sheltering Presence: Melita Denaro

Looking at a painting by Melita Denaro in a previous exhibition of her work in Dublin, a woman asked me “Where is the cow?”. Referring to the list of works in an effort to assist, I saw that the title – or, more accurately, the accompanying text – made reference to a cow, amongst other things, but I too was at a loss to locate it within the picture.

From this encounter I realised that the subjects of the narratives that run parallel to Melita’s work are not, or not always, what the paintings are directly concerned with. Instead they are intended to set the scene or provide a context or simply set down a record of other, seemingly incidental, events that occurred around the time each painting was made.

So what, then, are these paintings about? The stock response that the work is about the materials and the act and objectives of making marks in oil paint on canvas or panel in response to, in Melita’s case, the landscape or seascape of the Isle of Doagh and the Inishowen Peninsula must be left aside.

I sense that, for me, Melita Denaro’s paintings are about, or contain ideas of, Heaven. With their Blakean representations of sea and sky in all their rush and tumult, I believe that these paintings are made out of a sense of awe and wonder, and even contain intimations of rescue and redemption. More spiritual than religious, like the ‘high windows’ of Philip Larkin’s poem they suggest, or may be symbolic of, a yearning for a kind of comfort and consolation that is often lacking in the more secular age that we now inhabit.

Starker, wilder and more elemental than her previous works, these paintings of Melita’s continue to operate within a grand Romantic tradition, albeit from a humble field in the northernmost corner of Donegal.

Patrick Taylor Taylor Galleries, Dublin February 2019