DRIVEN FROM THE GET-GO, EVEN AS A CHILD, ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONIST PAINTER ANNE MADDEN HAD RIGOROUSLY HIGH EXPECTATIONS FOR HERSELF IN TERMS OF HER CREATIVE ABILITIES.

NOW, LATER IN HER LIFE, SHE FINALLY FEELS SHE HAS MET SOME OF HER GOALS. STORY BY ELIZABETH FRANCES MARTIN PORTRAIT BY PIERRE LE BROCQUY

This is the kind of tea you could trot a mouse across," says the articulate and elegant artist, Anne Madden, comfortably ensconced in her beautifully-renovated Dublin home. Finally settled after a disruptive move, Madden and painter-husband Louis le Broquey have returned to Ireland after having lived in southern France for many years. Madden's heritage is a complex one; her parents' (Irish father, English mother) home was in Chile, but Anne was horn in London and spent a great deal of time in the west of Ireland at the home of her godmother in Co. Glare.

"I started painting when I was very young, but found the process to be extremely frustrating because I felt I didn't have any skills. My mother took me to see a 14-year-old Chinese calligrapher when I was 10. I watched him making his signs with incredible skill, decisively dipping his pen, and I thought that perhaps there was hope for me after all; if he could create with such aplomb and skill, then I, too, could learn." Unbeknownst to the precocious Ii-year-old Madden, one of her paintings was selected and sold as part of an exhibition of children's art that was organized to benefit European refugee children. When the headmaster of her school called her into the office to announce what most artists of any age would consider to be very exciting news indeed, this young painter was outraged and incensed. "I was furious that they hadn't asked me for my consent, and they were amazed that I felt so strongly. In fact, I said I would no longer go to art class, simply because I felt my work wasn't good." After negotiating the parameters of her future participation in art class, she continued to study and eventually felt more confident about her progress once she began to show work publicly in London at 18. Working within the tradition of naturalistic landscape, her early works often refer to the land she loved in the west of Ireland, yet did so with an emphasis on the underlying structure and formal qualities of the abstracted, often simplified composition.

Sometime in 1956, she saw an exhibition of the New York School of painters in London and experienced a cataclysmic shift in her approach to her own work. "It was an incredible shock, it fired me like nothing I had seen previously in London or Paris. The exhibition included work by Barnet Newman, Mark Rothko, Sam Francis; seeing the freedom of Jackson Pollock's work, all the possibilities, it was wonderful."

Suddenly, the formalist opportunities opened up fields of exploration within Madden's work, and she, like many other International artists of the time, began to experiment with the different language of visual expression, that abstract expressionism engendered.

She was not alone; abstract expressionism swept through the New York art scene and across international boundaries during the post-war 1940's and 1950's. Abstract expressionism represented the culmination of the development of modemism and its relentless progress towards abstraction. Inheriting the past European movements of cubism, fauvism and surrealism, artists explored the flatness of the picture plane, eliminated illusionist space, and emphasized the process of autonomous creativity without reference to outside images. Many artists sought to leave behind traditional imagery and representational narrative, choosing instead to incorporate abstracted images that were evocative of myth, redolent of the primitive. Many artists including Madden, were drawn to investigate and express universal archetypal themes of the unconscious as seminal psychoanalyst Karl Gustav Jung had explored.

Stylistically, color and gesture were stressed and, continuing in the northern romantic tradition, there was an increased emphasis on limitless space and transcendence. Often, artists like Madden would paint on their increasingly larger sized canvases directly on the floor, foregoing the familiar easel/brush tradition. The process of the approach was stressed, which opened up an existential dialogue between the individual artist and the inherent physicality of the paint.

In the late '50s, Madden began to pour oil paints directly onto the canvas. Liberated from the traditional approach, she produced evocative, abstracted and dreamlike landscapes that directly reflected her new technical concerns. "I started pouring paint; I really didn't want to interfere with it. I was staining and bonding the paint with the surface of the canvas; pouring it in very thin layers without too much maneuvering on my part, really it's a very risky methodology. All artists have a recognizable handwriting, mine is a look, and you can tell that these paintings are mine, even though my touch and codtrol was very remote; at times, I chose to paint without a brush, which is very difficult."

From the mid-60s on, Madden lived primarily in the south of France, had two sons, and continued to paint and exhibit widely in London, Ireland and Europe. She represented Ireland at the Paris Biennale in 1965--a career coup by anyone's standards. Her signature painting style developed and she continued to experiment technically and stylistically. Elements of narrative, however elliptical, surface in her work, reflecting the intensity of her life experiences. She has endured several tragic deaths in her family and has survived complex back surgeries that required difficult, long periods of confinement.

Reflecting thoughtfully on her artistic process, Madden cites the 1985 painting, Antigene and Polynices. "There is always an autobiographical element in one's painting," she says. "After my brother's death in 1984, I went into a very dark area, I couldn't work at all for a long period after he died. Eventually I started painting, and the images that appeared in the work were paths in the garden that led to the studio. I was desperately trying to get back to the studio, boxes of light started to appear in the work. These are not things I thought about then, only in retrospect can I see what I was doing."

The symbiotic relationship between her life and art produces paintings that beckon the viewer inwards in an irrevocable manner. After the death of her father, she painted Grave in 1997, a painting that is personal, yet simultaneously archetypal. On a luminescent field of translucent golden/earthly colors, a simple darkened cross hovers; the finished result is an extraordinarily intimate visual lament to an intimate loved one, forever lost.

Speaking about her recent exhibition at the Museo De Arte Contemporaneo in Oaxaca, Mexico, Madden gets alternately exuberant and contemplative. To illustrate a point in regard to the origin and completion of her latest painting series, Odyssey and Icarus, Madden lithely jumps up and energetically begins to pull several huge canvases out of their storage space. "I certainly never said to myself, 'I'm going to paint an Odyssey.' There were nine big square paintings and I found myself painting and ordering more and more canvasses, until eventually I came to the end of this particular series."

Her most recent paintings from this mythbased series plunge the spectator into the endlessly provocative depths of classical subject matter. Myths are ahistorical, essentially outside of time and space, and it is that cyclical sense of time that Madden revisits again and again, recounting the journeys of past and present, anticipating those to come. In the Odyssey and Icavus series, the paintings are virtually devoid of narrative, save for the lone figures of either an isolated boat, seen in the Odyssey, or the outline of the bird in various stages of flight, as in Icarus. "In this series, I was attempting to visually represent myriad layers of boundless spaces. With the painting Icarus, initially there is a sense of optimism, but of course there is the inevitable tragedy in the end; that same trajectory which I represent in the work is somehow related to how I, in turn, think about life. My journey through life and my work as a painter are two things which are closely related, and that merger or connection is one that I like very much." Madden's paintings capture the sense of fluctuating change; they are enlivened and animated. Behind the silhouetted figures are enigmatic, mystical, and multi-layered fields of shimmering color, which constitutes the incomprehensible space of the sublime. "It's interesting to see how space is treated right up through the history of painting, when you get to people like Manet and even some of the Goyas, you take the figure away and you can see something like a Rothko, the space behind the figure." In 1999, Madden was invited to create a significantly monumental work for the International Centre of Contemporary Art, Chateau de Carros, France.

For Empyn'us, she worked on the ceiling of a huge vaulted room measuring 50 m.(160.5 feet) located within a building in a small village near her home in France. She painted directly onto two large canvases that were then seamlessly affixed to the vast ceiling. She completely commandeered the imposing space and painted the walls and floors a brilliant white that reflected the deep sapphire blue and translucent gold of the intricately painted shape ascending above. "It meant something to me, I had an idea of a vault in the sky, it wasn't merely a decoration, it became symbolic of the highest element where the gods live, connected to the sun and pagan times. For me, the work is reminiscent of the sky that I had looked at all those years in France; I had been so affected by the light. As soon as I thought of the vault, the project made complete sense to me."

In talking to Madden about her work, she is lacking in pretension and is self-analytical in a witty and disarming way. "I set out to do this huge thing,[the Empyrius project] and then afterwards, I thought ironically that it was rather small. Doing this project became sort of a leaving thing, because I left the work behind in the village near where we lived."

With a painting studio space a mere l0-minute walk away from her home, Madden is back in Ireland ready for this next stage of her life. Vigilant and disciplined in her work habits, she nonetheless welcomes the circuitous changes and turns her path has taken. "I'm always interested in the concept of opening in my work, moving into another space that is more luminous and eloquent. My work has always been about that, the doors [in the paintings] are the remains of places and things I could pass through, to darker spaces or lighter, interior and exterior spaces." Madden returns to the theme of the journey again and again, rethinking and reworking the expression of flight, travel and exploration. The Icarus painting is concerned with the ascent and the descent--something that I imagine is inherent to all artists, one wants to reach so far, to attain enlightenment."

"I started with Icarus, as someone who goes beyond the bounds of reason and logic, who simply won't let anything stand in his way, yet he fails. Like him, we all profoundly fail; we can only grasp an ephemeral dream before it eludes us again, o