‘New Paintings and Some Drawings’ by Samuel Walsh
Official opening by Dr Hugh Maguire, Director, The Hunt Museum, Limerick
on Saturday, 9th August, at 4pm
‘Hiems V’, Acrylic/oil/canvas,100x100xcms, 2012.
The word ‘new’ in the title of this exhibition might happily be replaced with the word ‘newish’ except that the latter has an awkwardness that doesn’t fit with my way of thinking. The fact is that not all the paintings in this show are ‘new’ and the ‘new’ refers to what has become an established, stylistic consistency in the making of my art since about 2006. I have, for the first time in many years found a formula in which to lay down structure, line and colour in arrangements that reflect my observation of the world as I move through it and note its many variations and permutations.
These observations are not long studied examinations of situations. They are glances, glimpses, the edges and the ends of things, quick sightings of the world in very much the same way as most of us move through the places and spaces that make up our everyday experience. The difference is that I make a note of these experiences and consider turning them into something other than a memory. I make them into a story, a personal story that is unique to me and presents itself as a work of art. This is both the joy and the burden of being an artist; the ethical responsibility to see the world in a particular way and to document it in such a fashion that it can be universally experienced. The universality of art is not that it is the same to everyone but that each person sees it differently and therefore can experience that work of art exclusively to themselves sometimes shared using what is called language. Sometimes we see things the same; this is to be welcomed, but there are often subtle differences within that sameness. This way of looking at art and recognising it has been with us for many thousands of years but we live in an age of immediacy so we often confuse identification with understanding and ask the meaning of art where there is none or in some cases too much.
These paintings (drawings, studies) do not mean anything other than what you see in them. They are square (there are two exceptions here), coloured and have linear elements. The colours come from observations but may change in the making of an individual work and the linear elements come from drawings made in situ of any number of things. Sometimes the paintings come from a passage in a book, an idea I might have about the world, a note made from an old master painting or a simple observation on my part, but mostly they come from just looking around me at what is going on or in some cases what is not going on.
My work is often called abstract but I don’t see it like that. To me it is more like a new reality, a different reality and that turning a blank canvas into the illusion of a vase of flowers with the use of earth and mineral pigments and the hairs of a Chinese pig is real abstraction!
We all see the world differently which makes our individual worlds unique to ourselves. I just happen to have a process by which I can share that individuality with a larger audience. Samuel Walsh, Cloonlara, Co Clare, June-July 2014
Samuel Walsh…. was born in Wimbledon, London in 1951. Both his parents were Irish: his mother from Limerick, his father from Ennis. He was educated in London until 1968 and also in Limerick at Villiers Secondary School. Initially he lived in Limerick but since 1990 has lived and worked in Co Clare where he has a studio. He studied at the Limerick School of Art and subsequently took an MA in Fine Art (Painting) at the National College of Art & Design, Dublin. He also holds a NUI Diploma in Philosophy from Mary Immaculate College, Limerick. He was elected a member of Aosdána in 1997 and served as a Toscaireacht from 2007-2009. He is the founder of the National Collection of Contemporary Drawing that hangs in the Limerick City Gallery of Art. He is in the words of Róisin Kennedy of the National Gallery of Ireland: ‘…one of the country’s leading exponents of abstract art…’
www.samuelwalsh.com
RED COUCH SPACE
AUG 8– SEP 4
‘Sorting and Piecing’ by Mollie Douthit
Official opening on Saturday, 9th August, at 4pm
The exhibition runs 9th August- 4th of September and features oil paintings and gouache on paper. Douthit’s practice entails sitting with and looking at objects, relaying what is viewed with paint or drawing materials. Featured in this exhibition are paintings of small food items that are personal reminders of people and places. Douthit values how the discription of an object can be achieved through direct fresh mark making. The opacity of gouache encourages immediacy with material once it touches paper, marks left emulate what is being viewed immediately. The oil paintings are equally as demanding in their presence but begin to consider the space where the objects exist. The items are trapped within a new dimension of paint and no longer absent of that space, as in the works on paper. These works are meant to be an investigation of the colour and form of these objects, while enjoying the physical traits of something nostalgic, considering how it exists when it becomes something that is only to be viewed.
Mollie Douthit (b. 1986, Grand Forks, ND)
2009 BFA University of North Dakota
2011 Post Bac Certificate, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
2014 MFA Burren College of Art, Ballyvaughan, Ireland
Douthit’s work has been featured in the 2013 MFA edition of New American Paintings, MFA, Boston Medal Award Auction, RDS Student Art Awards exhibition, as well as the Saatchi gallery in London. Douthit exhibited in the 2013 RHA Annual Exhibition and received the Hennessy Craig Award. In February 2014 Douthit was featured in Saatchi Art’s Invest in Art series.
Starting in September Douthit will begin the Tony O’Malley residency in Kilkenny, and has been selected for a solo exhibition in the Ashford gallery space at the RHA, Dublin.
For further information on Douthit visit www.molliedouthit.com
