Cavanacor Gallery

 

Summer Show  June  – August  2001

Svend Bruun, Geraldine O’Neill, Jim Sheehy, Sean Fingleton, Eddie, Joanna and Eamon O’Kane.

Cavanacor Gallery’s Summer Show brings together a diverse and exciting body of work by national and international artists.

Jim Sheehy, lecturer at Limerick College of Art and Design and Director of the Cork Printmakers Workshop exhibits prints and etchings of America.  These are intimate monochrome cityscapes full of mystery that are executed from a bird’s eye perspective.  He also shows etchings of familiar landmark buildings in New York.  The mystery of the work could be connected with the experimental nature of the medium.  Sheehy himself says: “I find that the indirect approach used in printmaking suits me – no matter how well or skillfully you work – the final result is always a surprise.”  Sheehy lived in the US for twelve years and studied at a number of renowned New York institutions.

Geraldine O’Neill, a Dublin-based artist shows remarkable fidelity to process and technique through her still life painting.  It is at once, in the art historical tradition, the humblest type of painting – mere copying of nature and yet it goes beyond this to an exploratory approach of the genre, questioning the very elements of tradition.  O’Neill often implies the artist’s hand through inclusion of paint pots, tubes, brushes or some element of the studio.  Also through ‘An Dreoilin Dreoiteach’ she cleverly represents a vanitas symbol of a dead bird but this is thoroughly contemporary presented in isolation.  The vanitas element is no longer to be deciphered as part of the still life; instead, it is the still life surrounded by bright red that also references mortality.

Svend Bruun, a Danish artist based in Copenhagen, produces semi-abstract compositions that focus on the figure but also reference myth and symbolism.  They have a naive primitive quality that could be compared to the work of Basquiat and De Kooning.  He incorporates geometric forms and experiments with line in the confines of the canvas. There is a definite sense of layers of representation in each work.  Bruun has exhibited widely and his work is included in a number of corporate collections including Den Danske Bank, Unibank and BRF Kredit.

Sean Fingleton is originally from Donegal and is now based in Temple Bar Studios, Dublin.  He is an artist in the expressionist tradition influenced by the work of Kokoscha, Constable and Turner. His work in this exhibition is sourced largely from Howth and its environs. At once his skill and diversity is evident in his ability to capture both the calm stillness of the Irish Sea but also the intense drama and verticality of a cliff face. His textured approach to painting with heavy impasto and vibrant colour displays an intensity rarely matched in the field of landscape.

Joanna O’Kane studied sculpture in Belfast at the College of Art. Her new work continues her interest in the flow and movement of the material. The inspiration for these pieces is drawn from Hellenistic Sculpture. The flow of the Nike’s drapery creates movement and accentuates the semi-transparent form. The folds gradually multiply, becoming more variegated and gaining depth as the material is swept backwards. The figures have a delicate, graceful, organic quality, which transforms the traditional approach to this modern material.

Eddie O’Kane studied Fine Art in the College of Art in Belfast and is a Lecturer in Letterkenny Institute of Technology.  Although he works primarily in watercolour, the works in this show are in oil and acrylic.  In “Poppies”, through his composition and vibrant colour, Eddie achieves a three-dimensionality and depth. “Irises in the Old Rectory Window”, in contrast is a subtle intimate study in oils. His “Sea, Glencolmcille” shows the restless ocean and cliffs of southwest Donegal. His work is represented in various collections including the Office of Public Works, Royal Apartments Hillsborough Castle, and Donegal County Council.

Eamon O’Kane recently completed a Fulbright Scholarship at Parson’s School of Art & Design, New York.  The ten small acrylic paintings on board that are included in this exhibition are rendered from a mixture of sources inspired by Franz Kafka’s book ‘America.’ Kafka never visited the USA but wrote his text from secondary source material and so Eamon also plays with the notion of appearance and reality.  In a similar fashion some of these works are painted from photographic studies taken by Eamon while in the States, others from images in books and the internet.  It is left up to the viewer to decide on the historical origin of the painted image.