Blaise Smith’s intention for his new suite of paintings on view at the Molesworth Gallery in Dublin, is to provide a place ‘where the eye can rest’, he tells Angela Griffith
Blaise Smith is an en pie in air artist in the truest sense of the term. He is a painter that revels in the challenges and possibilities of representing his immediate surroundings through the medium of oil paint. Emulating long-established art traditions, with an easel, palette, paint and brush, he works directly from the motif before him. His marked facilities in drawing and in oil painting are informed and directed by his observations from life. Smith incisively records the fluctuating effects of nature such as dappled light and shifting winds that animate clouds, water and vegetation. His subjects also include man’s prosaic impositions on nature in the form of sedate farm buildings, machinery and fence-lined roadways. While Smith has taken photographs of his subject matter at times, they merely serve as a cursory form of note-taking; the primary source of his imagery remains the motif before him.
As Europe confronts its current refugee crisis, Kathryn Milligan looks back to 1916 when a Belgian artist was one of the 2,300 Belgian refugees who sought shelter in Ireland.
Peter Murray reflects on the cool Nordic aesthetic of Patricia Burns whose work is on view in January at the Taylor Galleries, Dublin.
Recent excavations at Rathfarnham Castle have brought the former inhabitants into focus, prompting Simon Loftus to recall some vivid episodes from the family’s history.