Lit from within with bright, electric colours,
and usually depicting action, often work or
play, Conrad Furey’s recent paintings buzz with vibrancy and intensity. The larger-than-life human figures, their wide-open eyes and moon-like faces tipped toward the heavens rather than each other, threaten to burst out of the frames that contain them. Yet they are also anchored in real life, wearing fishing gear, work clothes, sweaters, gloves, veils. By paying homage in this way to people going about the daily rituals of their lives, Furey evokes a sense of the sacred in the world of everyday activity. His art is about the empowerment and beauty of the individual and the community.
Originally from Baie Verte, the seventh of 11 children born to Steven and Ethel Furey, Conrad Furey left home when he was 18. In 1974, after studying commercial art at the College of Trades and Technology in St. John’s, he moved to Ontario where he attended the creative art program at Sheridan College in Brampton. He lives today in Hamilton, Ontario, with his wife Theresa Templeton, whom he met when she bought one of his paintings. Their 22-year-old daughter Leah
is also an artist.
"Heading Out"
Now 49 and a practicing artist for 28 years, Furey describes himself as self-taught, pulled into expression by instinct rather than learned technique. He says he has rebelled against what little formal training he has had, developing his own method instead.
"I generally start with a structure of lines and shapes," he explains, "working mostly with a brush in the wet gesso and pigment, concentrating on composition at first and then drawing out an image and developing it up to a grisaille or sepia drawing or painting. At times I’m able to work intuitively, not worrying about the rules but letting things form with a minimum of thought. Other times,
I find I'm more contemplative, paying attention
to the rules and the process. Somewhere in the middle of that scale would seem to be my
optimum target."
Furey’s creative agenda and imagery are guided by intuition. "My images come to me as in a poem," he says. "I don’t see them as I start but they form in a frenzy of activity. A message is built as if from the ground."
"I believe Conrad received his inner vision quite early," says his friend and fellow artist, Gerald Squires. "I’m convinced that it was such a deep and penetrating one that it completely overtook him and has continued throughout his adult life. Trivialities, -isms, trends – all were blocked out so that his vision became tender and open to his personal view of a universe he witnessed as a boy. I’m amazed that the vision hasn’t changed at all, it’s only become more refined, and the work has gotten better and better."
"Over The Wave," acrylic on glass
"I haven’t wanted to interfere with the progression of my art," Furey says. "It seems our mind often steers, with fears and preconceptions, what we do, rather than accepting the fruits of our hand. The challenge is deciding whether to follow the hand or the mind."
Furey uses many artistic media to meet this challenge. He paints on canvas and plywood,
has experimented with bronze, resin, and stone sculpture, and has even designed a set of 13 stained-glass windows for St. Michael’s Roman Catholic Church in Oakville, Ontario. His work can be found hanging in schools, hospitals, churches, and government buildings. For more than 20 years, he has regularly received commissions for paintings and murals for public buildings and spaces in Newfoundland and Ontario. Furey’s versatility and broad appeal have not only made him a sought-after community artist, but, as Squires says, "Conrad is a national artist who has brought the community to national attention."
His work pattern is regular and consistent. "I find I have to paint or do something with art every day," he says. "Mostly I am successful – in the doing, anyway. I’ve made a half-decent living from my work. My aim is not to get rich but to enjoy the doing, and if I can make a living at it in the meantime, all the better. Sometimes I feel there are too many self-made pedestals that artists have put themselves on – they don’t think they should get their art dirty by having to try and sell it."
"Conrad is the real thing," Squires says.
"No pretensions, no put-ons. He seems to me
to be in that enviable position of the unchanging,
that state of penetrating grace and oneness that comes to so few."
"Card Players": a metaphor
Many critics have commented on the simple, childlike quality of Furey’s characters, but their size and proportion give them an epic quality, as well. He portrays private lives on the epic level on which, individually, we all experience them. Their size becomes a metaphor for the dimension of the human soul in conflict with itself and, often, with the world. The backdrops to his human figures are almost always elemental – land and sea in textured blues and greens. The lines and rounded forms, the soft slopes and curves, build dreamscapes rather than realistic Newfoundland scenes. "His curvilinear lines create a wonderful sense of movement, a hallmark of his paintings," says Dave Barry, a collector who has followed Furey’s career for more than three decades.
Like other expatriate Newfoundland artists, Furey draws on many of our archetypal images, and has always appreciated the clarity that geographical and emotional distance can afford when dealing with the sometimes overwhelming notion of home. "Living away [from Newfoundland] means that I can get to the essence of the memories more easily, there’s less distraction," he told Joan Sullivan in a 1987 interview in the Evening Telegram. "The years I spent growing up in Newfoundland, that’s where all these images
are from."
The sea, the skiff, the iceberg, and cultural traditions such as mummering feature prominently in Furey’s work. They are represented with the veneration of remembered experiences, a particular time in Newfoundland’s history crystallized in – and possibly changed by – memory. Newfoundland is clearly Furey’s majestic muse, a larger than life spiritual force connecting him to his past.
"It seems that Newfoundland defines me," he says. "Our front door looked out onto an ocean bay, and that was my focus. I remember as a schoolboy thinking about how comforting it would have been to follow in my father’s footsteps, living off the sea. I loved those times spent out fishing together, but I also realized I would have to make my own way in the world, as our back door symbolically looked out onto mines and other kinds of work. It seems I paint what I dreamt of doing with my life."
"Don’t be fooled into thinking Furey’s work is just regionalist," Barry warns, however. "He’s created paintings based on Olympic sports, religious themes, and social issues. Recently he painted ‘The Card Players,’ which is a metaphor for the hand each of us receives in life."
Recently diagnosed with cancer and now undergoing chemotherapy, Furey continues to work every day on his art. His illness has spurred him to infuse even more colour into a style already characterized by a vibrant spectrum.
"Colour has been a major concentration of late, maybe to obsession," he says. "Using the full spectrum is a change from the more subdued colours of the previous stage of my work. I feel as though I’ve learned a lot in the past year. It seems that the learning I get from my work will never end. Every piece of artwork has its own challenge and something to teach me. In each project there
is the new, the feeling of starting from scratch,
like you have forgotten how you did it before.
I can only say that it keeps the process fresh
and challenging.
"Theresa and I had quite a shock with my illness but we’re confronting it," he says. "The illness and the response of other people give me a deeper appreciation of the value of human relationships. It enforces the feeling of being part of a greater community. It does reinforce a feeling that time is not be wasted."
Conrad and Theresa Furey: confronting it
The expression of passive resignation on the faces of Furey’s recent figures gives rise to speculation: what internal monologue goes on behind those eyes? How much of himself, his own struggles, is he putting into his work?
"I guess if there was anything that could be called a self-portrait, it would be the one with the man rowing his boat," he says. "That could be me – you know, a man alone with his Creator, that sort of thing.
"I don’t have an overt urge to portray spirit-uality in my work," he quickly adds. "But I also don’t try to hide it. The images I create contain my questions. What are we doing here, what is our purpose? Are we just here to work, to procreate?
Is our chore just to continue the species? Is there something more? My sense is that the answers
are unknowable. We can only find questions,
not answers."
Yet even with this undercurrent, the cumulative effect of Furey’s use of colour, form, and subject is a feeling of inherent celebration, even joy, in the gift of life itself. A composer of a Newfoundland-inspired visual symphony, Conrad Furey is keeping his own past alive while creating vivid, mythic images of our collective history. It seems ironic that his new works hung at the James Baird Gallery in St. John’s the same week the cod fishery was closed on the Northeast and
Gulf coasts of Newfoundland. Now, more than ever, we can see these new paintings as effervescent eulogies of a way of life we are inevitably
leaving behind.
