Patrick Reel: A Life in Paint

Abstract

Patrick Reel: A Life in Paint John O’Hagan1 (bio) I first met Patrick Reel around fifteen years ago. Initially I was drawn to the quaintness of and the atmosphere in the shop, house, studio, and gallery. In time we were delighted to become regular visitors to Ludlow St to meet Patrick and his sister Esther, and we became familiar with his wonderful life of artwork, the subject matter of a current retrospective exhibition of Reel’s work in the State Apartment Galleries in Dublin Castle. The purpose of this short essay is to tell the ‘story’ of some of the main developments impacting on Reel over his long and distinguished career as an artist. What is remarkable is that the quality of his artistic output has if anything reached new heights into his eighties. The setting for his life and work though are such an essential part of this man, the article will start there. 12 Ludlow St and the Oriel Café and Gallery You enter the house of Patrick and his sister Esther from Ludlow St in Navan, through the quaint shop there. As poet Tom French noted. The little red light on the CCTV camera glimmers like a sanctuary lamp. Esther will be along presently when she is finished on the phone, so you have time to stand and read the labels on the transparent sweet containers – Bullseyes, Butterscotch, Bon bons, Pear drops, Rosy apples, Brandy Balls, Cola Cubes, Clove rock, Cough Drops, Mint Imperials, Glucose Barley. The passageway leads between a glass cabinet in which china is arrayed on glass shelves and a wall shelved with 4lb jars of sweet, to living quarters. Leaving the confectionery behind you pass the low coal fire in the living room and enter the demesne of oils, charcoal, linen, paper, board, canvas, card, wood, and light.2 The house is a listed Georgian building, directly opposite St John’s Church of Ireland in the centre of Navan, where time seems to have stood still. Again, to quote French: God is in the house. It is less a case that you have stepped out of time than that the digital age has not crossed this threshold. Its wonders are [End Page 148] superfluous to this house’s needs. In a very real sense, the way things are is the way things used to be, and all the change that happens, occurs internally. French concludes with a further evocation of what so many people experience when they enter the Reel house: I think again of the upstairs room, the view, the silence, the smell of paint. Out of silence and seeing the images come and find their form through him. He has stopped time in the process, and his sensibility is one that has been honed by silence and seeing and dedication. Now, after more than half a century of ‘going at it’, approaching the quiet centre of his self, nothing is beyond him. What happened over that half century and more when Reel was ‘going at it’ in his painting is the subject matter of what is to follow. As the story of his life unfolds it does appear that nothing is beyond him, and remarkably still so well into his eighties. 1960s to early 2020s Patrick suffered prolonged ill-health earlier in his life. He turned this misfortune to good effect though by taking up a career as a self-taught artist, following the interest he had developed in the local De La Salle Primary School in Navan.3 By 1960 he was able to hold a one-man exhibition of eighteen realist paintings in the Navan Technical School.4 As early as 1963 a painting by Patrick Reel, ‘Portrait of a Young Girl’, was hailed as a beautiful portrait, which aroused ‘keen interest and admiration’ among viewers at a Boyne Valley Festival Art Exhibition, it being a highlight of the cultural calendar of the time.5 This early promise was highlighted again in a Meath Chronicle article in 1964. The article stated that ‘Patrick has been imbued with a remarkable flair for painting since he was a young boy attending the local De La Salle Brothers’ School’. By...