All of the oil paintings in this exhibition have been painted on canvass mounted on board.
Childhood memories were of the evening reflections on Lough Gill, Sligo as we sailed home from one of the islands, gliding over a mirror of quivering reeds, dark green islands and rippling silver and gold of the setting sun.
Reflections have always fascinated me with their vision of another world – a liquid undulating free world. You have to, in some way, express your wonder.
Two Sligo painters who influenced me, were Jim Houston and Michael Farrell. Michael won the Taylor art scholarship to Paris, and spent his painting life in Saint-Brieuc in Brittany. He was a gentle mystic and I remember him saying, “To me, to paint is to pray”.
Before he died he encouraged me to go to Paris to see the work of Corot, and the impressionists, the light, rhythm, and colour of Monet, Sisley, Pissaro, and the other masters. These paintings, together with all great art, possess the qualities of unity, vitality, infinity and repose. The painter is always pointing beyond, to a world of greater harmonies, beauty and peace.
Baudelaire expressed the meaning of the instinct for beauty: “It is that immortal instinct for the beautiful which makes us consider the world and its pageants as a glimpse of, a correspondence with heaven. The insatiable thirst for everything beyond, which life reveals, is the liveliest proof of our immortality”
