Michaele Cutaya looks forward to Cecilia Danell’s solo show at the Galway Arts Centre inspired by time the artist spent in Sweden and Norway
One of Cecilia Danell’s new paintings, Rising and Falling, depicts a timber cabin tucked away in the forest with dark evergreens in the background and leafless silver birch trunks in the foreground. Notions of Henry David Thoreau’s dream of solitude and self-sufficiency comes to mind. And yet on closer inspection the paint’s density seems to dissolve and the boldest brushstrokes are never far from a telltale drip. The entire scenery is on the verge of an abyss, the forest soil giving way to dripping paint and discrete areas of colour. The effect is two-fold, drawing our attention away from the illusion in pointing decidedly to the means involved: a painting is only a few brushstrokes away from the tubes from whence it came. The second effect is to undermine the reality that the cabin-in-the-wood’s image conjures up.
Peter Murray recalls the independent spirit Edith Blake, diarist and artist and one-time occupant of Myrtle Grove, Youghal, County Cork
While working as an intern at the NPA Mike Bors gained access to a remarkable collection created by talented amatuer, Sir Robert Ball, astromoner and scientific adviser to the Commissioners of Irish Lights
Peter Pearson welcomes a new chapter in the management of Johnstown Castle, County Wexford