Hughie O'Donoghue RA (B.1953) Swell, 2019 Oil on tarpaulin, 118 x 177cm (46½ x 69½) Exhibited: Limerick, The Hunt Museum, Time, Tide and the Memory, 2019 Swell is one of a series of paintings created by Hughie O'Donoghue over a period of several years under the thematic title Cargo. The term is deliberately ambiguous, and comes with some sinister connotations. Cargo is, collectively, a personal reimagining of FW Murnau's classic 1922 silent film Nosferatu, loosely inspired by Bram Stoker's Dracula. O'Donoghue delves into the symbolic and allegorical meanings of Murnau's work in the context of its, and our, times. When the film was made, Europe was haunted by the unparalleled disaster of the First World War, succeeded by an epidemic of Spanish flu. The vampire count, sneaked aboard a schooner in a coffin, is a lethal cargo, capable of infecting the world. O'Donoghue's paintings are rich in metaphor and not tied to any one interpretative meaning. The vessel is translated into the wreck of the merchant vessel the Plassy on Inis Oirr. O'Donoghue originally visited the site with his father in 1962. The experience stayed with him and he has returned to the wreck often as a motif in his work. The Plassy had played a military role in the Mediterranean during WWII (where his father served with the British Army). This century, as he worked, the slow tragedy of refugees trying to reach Europe was unfolding in the Mediterranean. And, of course, by the time the work was shown in restricted circumstances at the Galway International Arts Festival in 2020, as the exhibition Night Cargo, we were in the grip of a pandemic. O'Donoghue made the paintings on tarpaulin or sacking; rugged materials, as he put it, with their own histories rather than neutral, fine art supports. He leaves the folds of the tarpaulin clearly visible. In Swell, the ghostly form of the ship looms against an eerily lit expanse of sky, buoyed by a phosphorescent surge of water below. The curiously metallic glow of the composition is inspired by the intense, silvery light of early black-and-white film. Born in Manchester to Irish parents, O'Donoghue lives and works in County Mayo and in London. Elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in 2009 he has been artist-in-residence at the National Gallery London and St John's College, Oxford. His work has been widely exhibited in many solo shows and is included in numerous private and public collections. Often drawing on his own family history, he has described painting as a form of emotional archaeology, a means of recovering and remembering experiences, both individual and universal, often forgotten in grand historical narratives. As in Swell, the picture surface is worked and reworked as a charged terrain that will yield up secrets rather then a blank sheet. Aidan Dunne, May 2021