Front page	From the Event Guide archive! This article refers to an event which took place on, or until, 13 May 2004 Art Interview - Verne Dawson Everyday Art  Cosmology, prehistory, myth and allegory are just some of the preoccupations that inform the complex work of artist Verne Dawson. With a selection of his paintings currently on display at The Douglas Hyde Gallery, he is an artist who investigates the continuity between the past and the present in his subject matter and also in his use of the traditional medium of oil painting. Eimear McKeith spoke to him about his work.  Can you tell me about your background - where you grew up and how you became an artist?  I grew up in a pretty rural area in Alabama. I knew I wanted to be an artist but I wasn't from a world that made it clear how you could do that. So I thought that it might be good to have experiences and to see the world. I joined the Navy for a couple of years, and saw very little of the world actually - I saw a good bit of the sea. When I got out I went to New York and attended to The Arts Students' League, which was a very academic place. Then I got a scholarship for a progressive school in New York. Hans Haacke was teaching there, a famous conceptual artist from Germany. After experimenting with other media, it was the painting that kept my attention. I thought that if I had anything personal to bring to art that would be the way.  When you were under the direction of Hans Haacke, you were taught mainly conceptual art. Why did you decide to pursue the traditional medium of oil painting?  I think it might be my interest in history and my feeling that I wanted to be part of a line of development of man - from the cave painters 35,000 years ago to the present, people paint. Essentially, we use the same tools - a stick with some hair on the end of it, minerals from the earth mixed with some oil. I love that sense that I'm doing the same thing that people have always done. I also have high regard for its longevity: I've friends who work in more fugitive media like computers or video. Right now it's great but I know artists who worked in new media in the 70s, and it's so hard to even see it now because the technology has moved on. I like the idea that there's a timelessness to painting, partly based on the fact that we live in houses and we go to museums that have walls - flat planes that a picture hangs on. I can be pretty sure that 200 years from now people will still have walls and a painting will still hang on a nail.  Do you have any particular artistic influences?  I love De Kooning and Lucian Freud - people who have a good grasp of the medium and what it takes to make a surface beautiful. There are other artists of a more conceptual bent who influenced me because of their involvement with trying to break down that line between art and life. The extreme purity of modernism made an important contribution to culture, but I felt it had reached a dead end with Ad Reinhardt in the late 50s. Ultimately, you end up with a perfect, black painting - the pure modernist statement. I love those paintings, but I didn't want to work for 20 years and also come up with a black painting. I had to go in another direction. So many babies had been thrown out with the bathwater: the baby of perspective, drawing, painting, representation, the figure and even of allegory. It had just vanished in the 20th century. I felt that there wasn't much left but the bathwater. You had that pure statement of form and yet all of these wonderful things that had taken thousands of years to develop had just been dismissed. I wanted to bring them back, while giving them a vitality and a relevance to today.  Even though you have also painted a lot of portraits, still lives and abstracts, this exhibition seems to focus largely on landscapes. Why did you decide to do this?  They're more than landscapes in that I generally depict some kind of human activity that displays a culture of the past. I'm usually trying to find a cultural manifestation from the past that still has continuity in the present. Also I wanted to have a coherent exhibition, but all these kinds of paintings are important to me. Part of being a contemporary artist is having so many influences at play - we're aware of Egyptian hieroglyphs, African sculpture, Duchamp, Pollack, Chardin, da Vinci. That's a very unique situation in the history of man. I think students are taught that they must narrow down and have a signature style and a market for their work. I'm very skeptical of that, I think it shuts down the imagination and it denies the richness of the experiences that we have. I just wanted to be free. Freedom is of enormous importance to an artist. We're in the age of specialisation but I think the duty of art is to try to integrate all these things.  You are very concerned with the zodiac, astronomy, time and the seasons. How does this influence your art?  Having some method of marking time is crucial to civilisation. Astronomy played a major part of the intellectual life of very early man - it was the only way of keeping track of time. The very fabric of things we do today is based on astronomy. Astronomy is how one understands the cycle of time, what the moon and the sun are doing and why day, night, winter and spring exist. So much of the iconography, myths and religions of the world are really elaborate allegories to describe astronomical events, to describe the passage of the moon and the planets. The characters are personifications so that we can describe what's happening in the sky and relay it to other people through the generations. I see evidence of that continuity of the past and the present in so many ways in terms of calendars, holidays and pagan culture. Most people aren't terribly aware of it - the connection with the source material is slipping away. But it surrounds us and gives structure to our lives. You become aware of these connections and meanings - the whole world opens up and you see all these things in culture and society.  One of your paintings in the exhibition is set in the future. Do you have a vision of the future?  It's an optimistic fantasy of how we can return to some place where we have greater integration with the natural world and yet have an advanced technological society. I don't advocate us returning to the caves and becoming savages again. I advocate a different relationship to nature, an awareness of cyclical time as opposed to a purely linear time, and a sense of responsibility to our environment is key to that possibility of a renewal.  Your art has been described as "faux-naïf", but it is a label you disagree with. Can you explain your dissatisfaction with such a categorisation?  I think that most of the people who say that are very sophisticated people who believe that since man has mastered representational painting it's not a difficult thing to do and so any artist who wants to can simply study it and do it as well as Rubens or Titian. But there's an element of being self-taught now. I'm not naïve intellectually, unfortunately, and the idea that it's a fake naivety implies that if I wanted to paint like Giorgione I could readily do that. I'm trying to paint as best as I can and there's no attempt to make my pictures childlike or as if they're made by an utterly untrained person. That term implies that I'm feigning my approach to painting, that it's not authentic.  In your landscapes, the sky takes up a large portion of the canvas. What was your reason for doing this?  It's an appreciation of man's place in the world, in the universe and in nature. We're so human-centric at this point in time that we're not terribly aware of things outside of human activity, whereas in the past people were forced to realise their tiny stature in the universe. Now it's as though the universe is hardly there and the bigger picture has been lost. I wanted to make pictures that were really about the bigger picture - painting is about the bigger picture. I still call my work "pictures" rather than paintings.  Do you think there is a difference between a picture and a painting?  I think "picture" implies a space one goes into. An abstract painting is rarely a picture; an abstract painting is a painting because it dwells primarily on the material and the surface. I was always amazed as a student when reading theorists of abstract expressionism and minimalism: how there was the concept of the integrity of the picture plane. It's a flat plane, and so to create a picture was somehow dishonest and not acknowledging the true structure of the painting, which is true. But yet, it seems to underestimate the power of the human mind to take a flat plane and imbue it with all these other qualities. I find it hard to think of illusion as a dishonest approach to art. It totally underestimates human beings' capacity to understand abstractions, metaphors and allusions.  Do you have any general ideas on what you think the purpose of art is in the world?  I'd have to think a lot about that. I'd like to see art become so much more important, and by that I don't mean paintings or drawings, but just the art of everything. The art of making a loaf of bread, of designing a shop window, of being a good bus driver. It's a love of life, a love of the world, a respect for other people and it's trying to create a more perfect place for us to be and for other creatures to be. I wish everything were art. Maybe it will be, one day.  Verne Dawson's exhibition of paintings continues at The Douglas Hyde Gallery, in Trinity College, until Thursday 13th May. It is on show alongside Paradise [14] by Robert Adams. Admission is free. www.douglashydegallery.com