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Opening the exhibition Minister Hayes said: "This OPW /DFP exhibition is one of the longest running shared North/South visual arts projects and has been running annually since the late 1990s. Over the years, we have toured the work of hundreds of artists to arts centres, colleges, hospitals, theatres, libraries and even to the halls of Stormont in Belfast. This exhibition is entitled 'Elements', its theme exploring how the four elements may be represented in art and sculpture and it is a superb opportunity for all parts of the country to view important works from the National collections."
The Minister concluded: "Our collaboration with the Department of Finance & Personnel has been a fruitful one. The exhibition opened this year in Belfast Central Library, which was a great success, followed by the Phoenix Park Visitor Centre in Dublin, which had over 10,000 visitors. Last month the exhibition was enjoyed by visitors to Larne Town Hall and it will finish out 2012 here in the wonderful surroundings of Enniscorthy Castle, surely one of the jewels in Ireland’s heritage."
'Elements' is open to the public until 13th January 2013.
Minister Simon Harris launches 'Finders and Keepers' an exhibition of artworks from the State Art Collection at the Municipal Gallery, dlr LexIcon, Dún Laoghaire, 19 November at 6pm.
Minister Simon Harris, TD, Minister of State with special responsibility for the Office of Public Works today (19 November) welcomed the launch of 'Finders and Keepers' – an exhibition of artworks from the State Art Collection at the Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown Municipal Gallery, the dlr LexIcon.
Currently, there are over 16,000 artworks in the State Art Collection. The 'Finders and Keepers' exhibition is almost like a micro version of the Collection as it contains historic and contemporary works – the 45 artworks in the exhibition date from the mid 19th century to works created in the 21st century.
Speaking ahead of the opening, Minister Harris said, "I am delighted that my Office, the Office of Public Works has been involved in this very interesting collaboration with Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council. The exhibition includes a selection of artworks chosen by a group of older people from the county who were invited to work with artist/curator Claire Halpin and 'Finders and Keepers' is the outcome of the process. The dlr LexIcon is also a most magnificent new space proving very popular both within the local community and from further afield”.
Cathaoirleach of Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council Cllr Barry Saul said "we are delighted to host such a varied and eclectic mix of artworks from the State Art Collection".
In association with the 'Finders and Keepers' exhibition the team at dlr LexIcon are running an extensive educational programme including hands-on workshops, talks, tours and opportunities to hear from the Curators. This is an excellent programme that encourages visitors to return to the space to gain an in-depth knowledge of the art and the process involved.
The Minister concluded, "I would like to thank the Curators led by Claire Halpin, my own OPW team and the staff at the Municipal Gallery, dlr LexIcon for hosting the exhibition and I am sure that it will prove a popular exhibition here in Dún Laoghaire over the coming months”.
The Doorway Gallery hosts a exhibition by Geraldine O'Reilly..
1. Power of Nature
One of the great pleasures of living in Dublin is that we are withing minutes of the beauty of its hills and mountains, its streams and rivers, its coast with its vast strands or rocky beaches, its native woods of beech and ash or its forest of fir, spruce and larch. Countryside has always had a great appeal to me. From my teenage years I glorified in Sunday hikes with felloow scouts of our school troop to Dublin foothills, to Rockbrook, to spend hours among its ancient trees. The countryside has always maintained that appeal. I still enjoy being there, climbing the hills, even if it now means breathlessly, to reach the obelisk at Killiney or walking the sen’s edge. Nature affects us, touches us deeply. It gives us the space to be ourselves, to order our thoughts, to unravel our feelings. Or, much more, to take in the pleasures of being out of doors, the excitement, the rapture. As we walk out we are led beyond our reach, lured into hidden depth, enticed to scale heights, to breathe deeply and calmly, to enjoy its vast panoramas, the uncluttered space of it. The mystery that fills the depths of the dappled light of the woodland, its wonder, beyond the here and now, acknowledging a deep presence within us and utterly beyond, close to us and utterly other: -
Wherever we come across the ancient traces of men, we find that he has marked out special places and called them sacred: Kyeto, Machu Pichu, Ulura, Angor Wat, Skellig Michael, Glendalough, Dalkey. Countless peoples, diverse nations, cultures and faiths have found, and, still find, in nature, solace, repose, delight, and in silence an awesome presence.
“On the shore of the wide world I stand alone and think
till love and fame to nothingness do sink”.
2. Painting – Landscape: Nature’s Mediator
The landscape actualises an inscape, a deeper awareness of its existence by which “we see into the life of things” and thrill to “the deepest freshness, deep down things of what flames out like shining from shook foil, what gathers to a greatness lik the ooze of oil crushed”
That unique essence which surrounds us, penetrates us, enlivens us is expressed best in art, in poetry, in music, in painting. They propt us to glory in an awareness of their being, of our being, not just of being alive, but of being. To twirl in a dance of joy, to be disturbed with “ the joy of elevated thoughts”.
“A sense sublime
of something far more deeply infused
whose dwelling is the light of the setting sun,
and the round ocean
and the living air
and the sky
and in the mind of man”.
The Landscape: There have been some moments which I will never forget. In Tate Britain there was a room devoted to a suite of paintings by Mark Rothko which enraptured me when I first saw it and compelled that calm,n a privileged moment of memorable thrill which impelled me “to care and not to care, to sit still”. Barnett Newman’s great painting in New York’s Museum of Modern Art enveloped me in a similar way as did Frederic Church’s depiction of the Mountains of Peru in the Metropolitan and W.B. Yeats masterpiece “There is no Night” in the Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane. Landscapes can create a spell. Most of us can recall some that we love: a detail in a painting by Giotto or Perugino, Membling, Van Eyck or El Greco, a painting by Van Ruysdall, Gainsborough, Constable, Turner or Van Gogh. Ashford, Roberts or Barry, - Flanagan, Mc Sweeney or Teskey or one of the many other fine contemporaries who produce such marvellous works of Art.
Settings for the sacred to inspire devotion, records of real estate to impress visitors to the city mansions of the landed gentry, souvenirs of intrepid travellers or adventurers, expressions of local pride, of faith, of joy. So they were and are for the patron, the artist, the viewer. They work for their keep, lending a room a view, suggesting light and space, reminders of past expeditions and romance, laying out paths, inviting us to wander and to wonder. The open seas extend our boundaries, the open skies pierce of roof-tops, the tall trees raise our ceilings. Our troubles are dwarfed, our fears calmed. We find new courage. We stand erect. We sail for distant shores. We climb through the branches. We claim new peaks. We stride across vast fields. The wonder of a landscape is that it can transport us from the confinement of our homes to other realms. To that other realm of the Other, the Sublime. We find the peace, the quiet, the repose that intimations of immortality brings.
“Beauty is truth, Truth Beauty – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know”
3. The Tree – Nature’s Sentinel
Among nature’s greatest glories are the woodland and the Forests and what constitute them, the tree. The hills and mountains to the south of the vcity show them at their finest: Kilakee, Kippure, Djouce present them in all the contrasts, of oak and beech, Fir, Spruce and Pine, soaring upwards, straight or bent and gnarled. Myths attach to ancient forests have many different meanings. Classical Greece venerated groves sacred to Artemis and Apollo. Their cults of fertility, the hunt and the tree oracle transferred to Rome. Arcadia was imagined as a wooden, rocky place, the haunt of satyrs and the realm of Pan. In Germany the primeval forest was the site of tribal assertion against the might of Roman Empire of stone and law. In England in the woods the King disported his power in the royal hunt and the rebel asserted his freedom in poaching the herds. In Ireland the wood, despoiled by the invader become a symbol of our lost riches and our freedom.
“Cad a dhéinimíd feasta gan adhmaid? Tá deire na coillte ar lar”
4. Treescapes – The Sentinel’s Trumpet
In Painting, in the 15th and 16th centuries, especially with the Northern European artists such as Albrecht Aldorfer and Albrecht Durer, the forests are home to saintly hermits, battling the evils within them or the warrior saint George confronting the embodiment of paganism in the Dragon or Christopher finding Christ in an act of kindness. The tradition continued through many painters, in particular, in the 19th century , Casper David Friedrich (you may recall “Hunter in the Forest”) or the more recent Anselm Kiefer whose dark murky pictures of the 70’s and 80’s depict a distressed troubled world.
We still invoke it as we recall and recount the fables of our childhood, of the Brothers Grimm and C.S. Lewis, which imagine the forest as places where Hansel and Gretels, Liesels and Franzes, Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy face the perils of being robbed, lost and frightened and exercise courage and generosity to achieve peace and freedom and wisdom.
Geraldine O’ Reilly – Nature’s Trumpeter
There are many strands which form the context in which I delight in these beautiful paintings of Geraldine O’ Reilly. I love Geraldine’s paintings for their depicting so vividly the wonders of nature. The first time I came across her work was two years ago and I was thrilled by it. It was “Boundary Wall”, a large work of dry stone wall, trees and open countryside and I purchased it, not, alas, for myself but for a friend and client who also was enchanted by it. Geraldine loves to go walking in the countryside, in the hills of County Dublin and County Wicklow, in the flatlands of Donabate and Portrane and further afield, especially near Fenit in County Kerry and Lough Crew in Westmeath. Wherever she goes, she pays attention to the trees and the light and its moods which change from one moment to the next. The inspiration for this exhibition which she entitles “Under the Cover of Trees” comes from those walks. What she sees, she observes closely and renders them vividly afterwards in paint, the dark and the light, the sinister depths and the calm and release of the clearing. The deathly silence within and the lively brightness and murmurs without, the constriction and opression of the canopy of overhanging branches, the freedom of the open expanse. She makes me relive the joy, after trecking through the forest on the slopes of Djouce Mountain, of arriving at the spectacle of the panorama over the Powerscourt waterfall above Enniskerry, of the sudden delight of the sundrenched field as I reach a clearing in the forest above Kilkee.
Geraldine’s artistic career took off in NCAD where she graduated with a First Class Honours Degree in Fine Art and Art History and it may surprise you that her work there was influenced by Systemic, Op and Kinetic Art, especially through the work of Sol le Witt and Bridget Reily. Since then, rearing a family and working to support them consumed most of her day with little time to further progress her career as a painter. But, somehow she kept her eye alert and her hand in practice and now that her three daughters are grown she has returned to her profession almost full time, but in a circuitous route. From those influences of earlier years, the hard edge and cerebral imprint of systemic and Kinetic Art and its grids has given way to the more imaginative and natural intricacies of the interlaced horizontal and vertical lines of woodland trees. She has reversed the path followed by Mondrian and rediscoverd the wonder and beauty of nature and its natural forms.
The paintings of this exhibition mirror the mathematical gids of systemic art. Vertical tree trunks, both narrow and broad, are etched with dappled bark and moss; floating branches laden with their particular leaves, round and curving or angular and spiking, cut through, bisecting and dissecting the aerial space above; underfoot pathways lead to hidden seclusion or out to bright light filled horizons of glorious brightness. The paintings are beautiful and a testimony of Geraldine’s artistry. I have been enjoying contemplating them and look forward to continuing to admire her work in the future and I invite you to do the same.
By Frank X Buckley
