Culture Ireland grants
Some twenty artists benefitted from Culture Ireland grants in the September quarter, with contemporary artists gaining most. By far the biggest grant (€25,000) went to a group show of twelve Irish artists at the White Box in New York – an extension further part of the Imagine Ireland promotion of Irish cultural events in the US. But the biggest individual grant (€12,000) went to Nina Canell in support of her forthcoming show at the 18th Biennale in Sydney from 27 June next. Nina is part of the Mother’s Tankstation establishment which advocates the conceptional notion that ‘idea dictates form’ and thus foregrounds no particular medium. Mother’s Tankstation also boasts that it intends to fracture the expected mould of the Irish commercial art gallery. Nina and her collaborator Robin Watkins (both born in Sweden) now live in Dublin. One of the central characteristics of their work is their use of unorthodox sculptural materials and combinations like found debris or leafless branches cradled in the fingers of neon lights. Another characteristic of their work is its combination with music. Nina says that they are interested in engaging with acoustic phenomena as a catalyst for the collective imagination – in the construction of a magic image. Smaller grants went to Magnhild Opdøl (currently the RHA’s Artist in Residence in Kilkenny) who will be showing in Norway next year; Sarah Browne who has a show in Birmingham in Febraury and in Vancouver in June; Kate Arslanian who has a solo show in New York in April; and Bettina Seitz who has an exhibition of new works at the Belgravia Gallery on Albemarle Street London in November 2011

John Shinnors’ Alma Mate
On a visit to his Alma Mater, the Limerick School of Art and Design last year, John Shinnors had a bright idea for the glazed atrium of the newly refurbished Clare Street Campus: why not a large and ambitious piece of work by Limerick’s favourite artist to greet students as they entered the building? The school was delighted. Shinnors set about the creation of a suitably large canvas for the site increasing his intial ideas of scale so as to make the painting to be of appropriate scale to its setting. The result is Snowy Estuary Lighthouse, an oil on canvas (243x365cm) which rather appropriately was installed during last winter’s snow. The artist has presented the painting to the school on long-term loan.

Pure Gold
The painting Pure To Another (Portrait of Brian Kennedy) was awarded the Perpetual Gold Medal at the RUA Annual Exhibition, held at the Ulster Museum. This is the third time painter Colin Davidson has won the prestigious Perpetual Gold Medal, the Royal Ulster Academy’s highest award. Davidson met singer-songwriter Brian Kennedy at the opening of the Lyric Theatre and asked him to sit for him; the painting was worked on from May to September this year and will go on loan to the Lyric joining Davidson’s series of portraits of writers and actors associated with the newly built theatre. In addition to the prize giving, certificates were awarded to five new members of the Academy (three Associate and two Honorary members) who were appointed at the organisations AGM in June of this year. They were Diarmuid Delargy, Barbara Freeman and Sharon Kelly who became Associates of the Academy and Helen Falloon and Glenn Patterson who were appointed Honoraries. David Crone, Terry Gravett and Rosie McGurran were also elevated from Associates to Academicians.

New Memorial for Survivors of Industrial Abuse
Entries have now closed for the €500,000 Memorial to be erected in memory of Survivors of Industrial Abuse. The minister for Education Ruairi Quinn appointed a committee to oversea the design and commissining of the memorial and the competition is being organised and administered by the Commissioners of Public Works (the OPW) The closing date for expressions of interest was 13 October 2011 and since then the list of applicants has been reduced to a final ten. An announcement of those applicants short-listed is expected before the end of November. Happily the chairman of the Jury is the very experienced Sean Benton who retired as Commissioner in the OPW last year. After that there is a strong representation of architects among the ten person jury. These include Billy Houlihan, formerly Cork County architect, Seán O’Laoire of the RIA, and Pat Cooney who is principal architect in the OPW. The Arts Council is well represented with Monica Corcoran and two others (unnamed) nominated from the AC. There is also one international juror and two members of the Memorial Committee, Bernadette Fahy and Paddy Doyle, representing the survivors.The announcement of the Competition Winner is not expected before June 2012.

Carey Clarke’s retrospective
In an eleven-page assessment of the work of Carey Clarke in the 1996 edition of the Irish Arts Review, Bruce Arnold characterized Clarke as a ‘master craftsman. He paints with something of the exact precision of classical figures such as Poussin, with the lines of Ingres, with the palette of Vermeer.’ Now this PP of the RHA (he is one of only four Past Presidents still at work the others being David Hone, Tom Ryan and Stephen McKenna) is making the final preparations for his retrospective at the RHA which will reflect a long life devoted to academic painting and teaching.
The body of work chosen for this retrospective comprises portraits, still-lifes, landscapes and interior/exterior intimiste pieces which are outstanding exemplars of their genre. Still lifes which feature prominently in the collection include his 1993 oil on canvas entitled The Gift which was displayed in the National Maternity Hospital centenary exhibition. It depicts a bas relief of a Madonna and Child in front of which are placed offerings of bread and wine and a vase of white flowers. The inherent symbolism is obvious – sacrifice and and purity. As a landscape artist, Clarke is at his most exacting. His depiction of Evening – Dublin Bay in the treatment of light as seen from Dún Laoghaire pier and as usual the detail is phenomenal. Among his best portraits was that of Homan Potterton 1988, then Director of the National Gallery. Exemplary of the artist’s classicism in all its detail, the principle of the Golden Section was applied three times in creating this composition. The Clarke Retrospective opens 13 January 2012 at the RHA.

Anthony Scott at the Beaux Arts in Bath
How does a sculptor like Anthony Scott who chooses to live in the West of Ireland manage to find a market for his art in these depressed times? Scott lives and works in Sligo ‘under bare Ben Bulben’ where he models stylized animals, horses, dogs, deer, bulls and even birds drawn from Celtic mythology. These then have to be transported to Dublin where they are cast at the Cast Bronze Factory on South Brown Street, Dublin 8. The finished products are then shipped to his main gallery in the UK, the Beaux Arts in Bath which is run by one of the lucky diaspora, Aidan Quinn from Strabane. Scott (see the Irish Arts Review Summer 2009) hit the headlines earlier this year when the piece he had designed for the National Stud in Kildare was unveiled by Queen Elizabeth II during her visit there in May. The design was of a globe, with small figures of horses therein. But why a globe? The answer lies in the connection to the founder of the National Stud, one Col William Hall-Walker, the Kodak heir, philanthrophist, art collector and lover of horseflesh. Walker, influenced by astrology believed that the Signs of the Zodiac had more bearing on a thoroughbred’s racing performance than had its blood line. Whatever about that, his The Soarer won the Grand National in 1896 and Scott’s Globe called Sea of Stars commemorates the Colonel’s faith in the firmament.
Scott also shows his work each year at the London Art Fair in January, the Royal College of Art in London and the Art London show in Chelsea. His exhibition in Bath continues for another few weeks.

Artists in residence
The cream of those programmes to mollycoddle artists who formerly, we are led to believe, had to survive in garrets is surely to be found at the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris where Sheila Pratschke has been the Director for some years. The only snag is that you have to be very lucky to be selected and visual artists appear to be in the minority. The CCI programme which usually spans a three-month residency not only has the huge attraction of living in the centre of Paris but the bursary comes with free travel and accomodation and €700 per month pocket money thrown in. In recent years visual artists partaking in the programmes have included Mick O’Dea, Martin Healy, Eithne Jordan, Maud Cotter and Eamon O’Kane.

Back home the residencies available at IMMA are perhaps the most sought after in Dublin, but there are an increasing number of residencies available for artists in the country thanks to more local authorities taking the initiative in this area. Apart from these, the annual RHA/Tony O’Malley home and studio residency in Kilkenny is hard to beat. Magnhild Opdøl has been living there for the past year in O’Malley’s family home which was converted by Jane O’Malley and made available for the student residency. Next year the lucky recipient will be Ciaran Murphy who has shown at the Douglas Hyde and Grimm Gallery, Amsterdam apart from the RHA. It is said that his practice is ‘predominantly an enquiry into what it means to perceive the world through the human eye’. The most valuable of all residencies, of course, is the one offered by the Arts Council for the programme at Location One in the Soho district of New York. This year the lucky recipient is the 33-year-old Atsushi Kaga who scooped the $45,000 bursary for a ten-month stay in the Big Apple. Atsushi seems something of a specialist in securing artist residencies having secured one at the ISCP in New York earlier this year. Last year he had a residency at IMMA and in 2009 he was at Fountainhead in Miami and Galeria Leme in São Paulo. Kaga’s work is said ‘to depict a fictionalized world inhabited by a cast of invented characters. He plays with tension between integrity and corruptibility, nature and nurture, innocence and experience and freedom and constriction’.

VUE at RHA
Everybody seemed pleased with the VUE art show at the RHA early in November. The twenty or so galleries showing praised the RHA venue for its convenience in the centre of town and the good attendance it attracted. The RHA itself, after some hesitation about setting up competition to its own sales, was pleased with the big numbers of new art buyers and the sale of work by some RHA members. Among these were Mick O’Dea whose Portrait of David on the Jorgensen stand sold for €12,000 and Michael Warren's steel construction which made the same amount. A still life by another RHA member, Liam Belton, sold for €4,800. Red spots were also noted at the Cross Gallery where a Simon English oil on canvas brought €1,200 and a Claire Carpenter tempera and gesso on board was sold for €900. Here also, two watercolours with pencil and ink on paper by David Eager-Maher sold for €1,200 each. At the Hillsboro, a typically bright and colourful Sheila Rennick was bought for €1,200 by a 21 year old! The new VUE sale is likely to be repeated at the RHA next year

Ministers launch IAR Online Archive
Our thanks are due to the two Ministers Jimmy Dennihan, Minister for Tourism, Culture and Sport and Ruairi Quinn, Minister for Education and Skills who kindly attended the launch of the IAR Online Archive in the National Gallery of Ireland on 27 September. The Archive includes the complete edition of the Review since it was first published in 1984 after initial digitization had been completed by the Centre for Data Digitization at Queen’s University, Belfast in co-operation with JSTOR. The development of this data into a searchable database available on www.irishartsreview.com was completed by the IAR with joint support from the Departments for Culture and for Education. As a result of the above, the Archive is now being made freely available to approximately 1,000 post primary schools in the Republic for use in art education classes. The Archive is also freely available to subscribers to the IAR who may use their unique subscription number to access the Archive.
Another great result from the digitization process, of course, is that the substantial corpus of work contained in the 15,000 pages of scholarly comment and critque on Irish art, architecture, heritage, craft, design, photography and sculpture since 1984, will be preserved for posterity. Taken all together, the Archive comprises a beautifully illustrated mini-history of the visual arts in Ireland over the past 27 years which will now be available all over the world. The Index to the Archive has been designed for easy access to the 1,600 articles included. These are categorized under 23 separate headings from Antiques, Antiquities, Architecture, Artists, Art Associations and so forth. And the extensive list of Book Reviews related to Irish art can also be easily sourced as they are all indexed alphabetically under the names of the authors. It has always been the policy of the Irish Arts Review to record the contemporary achievements of those at work in the visual arts in Ireland. In this very edition we cover the collaborative work of Cleary and Connolly, the Spanish paintings of Michael Cullen, the life in sculpture of Colm Brennan, the architecture of Kevin Roche, the Connemara adventures of Tim Robinson and the sheer skill of Sonja Landweer amongst others. But we also examine the craft of the 13th-century masons who created those awsome memorials in limestone which have survived to this day. The IAR will continue to explore the rich vein of artistic creation that has enlightened the history of Irish art since the Golden Age of the 8th century and, hopefully, this too will be of interest to young art students today.