Institution
Limerick School of Art and Design (LSAD)
Medium
Painting
Graduation Year
Class of 2026
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I had academic training in painting in Dublin as a teenager with George Collie, RHA in the early 1970s and I returned to it in 2020 after a long career in medicine as an obstetrician and gynaecologist. I graduated from the Royal Hibernian Academy of Arts School in 2023. I am more interested in older forms of painting than in the avant-garde, believing that, for Europeans, our immersive experience of and cultural identification with painting is more about the Nabis, Cubism and the High Renaissance than it is about many current curatorial preoccupations. Our extraordinary heritage of European painting remains a deeply reassuring and unifying constituent in contemporary European life. Would there even be a European Union without it? A core tenet is that painting is still primarily a matter of form - colours, shapes, surfaces, juxtapositions - rather than content or concepts. The selection of subject material is underpinned by a basic value system: art is a way of paying one’s respects and one chooses to paint something - a person, an animal, a room, a performance - that one has thought about, admired, loved, considered important or beautiful. Thus, the subject is elevated, exalted even. In this approach, there is agreement with John McGahern’s concept of art as ‘praise’ and with Maurice Denis, for whom the essence of art was to express love and faith. Perhaps because of my previous work, I have regard for the ‘madonna and child’ genre of painting and I see Raphael’s seeking of perfection in his works within that genre as profoundly intellectual. My interest in the work of Raphael has origins in Vasily Grossman’s essay on the Sistine Madonna (1955), a work that Grossman described as ‘immortal’ and which he linked to his experience as a Red Army war correspondent upon entering the Nazi death camp of Treblinka in 1945. I subsequently went to see this most famous madonna in the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden. The Sistine Madonna and the small but joyful Madonna of the Pinks, which hangs in the National Gallery in London, were the main inspirations for the work entitled ‘Nine Madonnas after Raphael’, which has been acquired by TUS for its new building on the Athlone campus. A note on technique: I work exclusively in oil paint, charcoal and graphite. I tend to use linen canvases from the excellent Milliken Brothers in County Down. For ideological reasons, I use only European Union paint, mainly Schmincke and Old Holland. Paint is applied very generously and scraped down multiple times, a technique I learnt at the RHA School (the late Frank Auerbach used this method). I work very slowly and the paintings usually take several months to finish.
