paul kelly

Gorry Gallery • 1. Threshing Fair, Moynalty

3. Cover – Sunday Afternoon, Collon Fair 34. Backcover – Evening, Harbour

© GORRY GALLERY LTD. Gorry Gallery

PAUL KELLY New Horizons

2nd November – 9th November 2001 59. Quiet Time, Loughshinny Harbour

4 9. Low Tide, Loughshinny Harbour

5 45. Afternoon Stroll, Skerries Harbour

Introduction

1 ew Horizons an exhibition of some seventy works crafted over the last 2 ⁄2 years show NPaul Kelly’s development as a painter observing the local terrain in a new light, not abandoning his early vision but interpreting his surroundings afresh with a brighter palette and verve.

The new paintings here also include watercolours and an expanded subject-range with more figures and animals featuring in horse and threshing fairs, steam rallies and thatching work.

6 The exhibition also features landscapes in Kerry, Louth, Meath and Wexford as well as snow scenes from a recent stay in the Czech Republic.

When an artist lives and paints almost exclusively in the same area, in this case Fingal, concentrating on its Harbour views, coastal and rural scenery in Rush, Skerries, Loughshinny and Balbriggan one expects repetition to be the norm. This is not the case with Paul’s paintings, which, I would suggest, derives from his youthful observations of the rather flat Fingal landscape, not unlike the environment from which the Dutch painters of old created exciting images almost out of nothing. By closely observing the changing light, cloud formations and open spaces, they mastered this challenge. Today, unfortunately, many painters search out the scenic ‘bird’s-eye-view’ as their subject matter and paint the obvious without this vision.

Living in the heart of Fingal, Paul has walked the land since his childhood, seeing the same vistas again and again as they changed with the seasons and, of course, the light from dawn to dusk.

Painters, when popular, must not stand still and produce pictures on demand, however tempting, or change style and direction for the sake of change. We can see clearly here in Paul’s paintings the vision and quality expected of him, yet he seems to have finally ‘come of age’.

His keen observational powers, compositional skills and painting technique, together with hard work and a sensitive eye, are some of the ingredients that created the fine paintings in this exciting exhibition, all of which display a remarkable consistency of excellence.

I would like to thank Pauls wife Deborah for her support over the years, and his three daughters Joanna, Emma and Alyssa, who grace his pictures regularly and, of course, my wife Thérèse without whose assistance this exhibition would not have been possible.

Finally, I would like to thank Dr. Peter Harbison for his illuminating and concise essay on Fingal, which is a joy to read and puts Paul Kelly’s paintings in context.

James Gorry

7 48. Cows near Valentia, County Kerry

8 41. Playing on the Strand, County Kerry

9 Chronology

1968 30th June, born in Dublin

1972-80 Educated Rush National School.

1980-85 St. Joseph’s Secondary School, Rush.

1989 Studied painting in the U.S.A. under Chinese painter Sunny Apinchapong Yang. Exhibited at the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin.

1991 Exhibited at the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin. Obtained the James Kennedy Memorial Award for portraiture at the Royal Hibernian Academy. Exhibited at the Academy Banquet Exhibition. Exhibited at the National Portrait Exhibition. Exhibited at the Awareness Exhibition (for Autism).

1992 Gorry Gallery “Recent Paintings” May. Gorry Gallery Irish Paintings October/November. Self Portrait, National Self Portrait Collection, Limerick. Painting purchased for the Bank of Ireland Collection.

1993 Exhibited at the Royal Hibernian Academy. 7. Looking Towards Skerries Painting trip to Morocco. Exhibited Boyle Arts Festival Gorry Gallery “Autumn Exhibition” September.

10 1994 Exhibited at the Royal Hibernian Academy. Assistant Art Director for MGM Studios, Los Angeles, California on Animated feature. Painting purchased for the Brian P. Burns Collection, U.S.A.

1996-99 Contracted by 20th Century Fox, Phoenix, Arizona to paint backgrounds on 2 feature length films. 36. Kerry Strand Painting purchased in aid of the Irish American Fund. Gorry Gallery “Recent Paintings” March ’99. Painting purchased for Fingal Country Library. Included in “Who’s Who in Ireland”, The Influrntial 1000 (editor Maureen Cairnduff). Included in “A Buyers Guide to Irish Art” (20 Hot Up-and-Coming Irish Artists - Ashville Media Group). Gorry Gallery “Irish Paintings” July ’99. Gorry Gallery “Group Christmas Show”.

2000 “The Liffey Rowers”, exhibited at the John F. Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts, Washington. (Milllennium Celebration of Ireland: Arts from Ireland). Receives the Ireland Fund of Great Britian “Artist of the Year” Award. Gorry Gallery “Group Christmas Show”.

2001 Article entitled “A Classic Contemporary”, Antiques Ireland - Volume 2, May- June 2001.

11 57. Pony Ride, Prague

12 27. Sunset, Rogerstown, Rush

13 50. Red Boats, Balbriggan

Fingal: Paul Kelly’s Country

and of fair strangers’ may be the translation of Fingal, that part of north ‘Lof the Tolka, but the area itself is not strange – only unfamiliar, less well-known than the Fingal’s Cave of Mendelssohn’s overture, located much farther to the north on the Hebridean island of Staffa. The Irish Fingal is more of an Aladdin’s Cave, a garden of delight full of things waiting to be discovered by those enterprising enough to venture into what many south of the Liffey would regard as ‘Tiger Country’ but which is, in effect, a landscape gentle and welcoming where molehills sometimes seem like mountains.

14 One of these is Baldungan, a few miles inland from the sea at Loughshinny, where a medieval church ruin enjoys an unparalleled panorama of Fingallian geography. From there, the eye cannot fail to be attracted to the island of Lambay basking like a whale a few miles off- shore to the east, while golden fields of corn or baled hay stretch for miles southwards towards the sun – and the Rogerstown inlet, a quiet wildfowl estuary where spindly herons watch fish and trains go by. Beyond, across the peninsula with Newbridge House, lies Head, with the Sugarloaf 62. Tulip Fields, Rush dramatically rupturing the undulating skyline of the Dublin Mountains on the far horizon. To the north-east, Rockabill lighthouse rises pin-like to the skies atop its rocky island perch, and the town of Skerries nestles more directly to the north where, towards Balbriggan, Ardgillan Demesne offers a wonderful sloping view over the Louth landscape to where the Mourne Mountains sweep majestically down to the sea in a theatrical backdrop. Westwards, mildly-humped ridges roll smoothly, knitted together by scattered trees and hedgerows unfolding themselves within a jigsaw of roads which are one of Fingal’s pleasures – at least to those who come well-equipped with maps! Leafy lanes, russet in the autumn glow, proliferate and – like the Alhambra in Spain – offer a new and unexpected vista around each corner, as yet not smarting from the surgery required to give Fingal another rare straight line in the form of the Dublin-Belfast motorway. This new incision is cutting through a countryside so idyllically rural that it is difficult to realise that the sea is never too far away, where the soothing roar of the waves can be heard when the east wind beats up against the rocks or sandy beaches. This is truly the garden of Ireland where strangers – not the fair-haired Viking foreigners who lent their name to the area – but Dutch bulb-growers came in the last century to join the locals, particularly around Rush, to create a little Holland with fields of daffodils and tulips which bring such colour and joy in season to those travelling on the Dublin-Drogheda railway line. Though on the doorstep of suburban Dublin, this is still very much countryside, where more

15 recent foreigners with Baltic tongues can be found helping with the vegetable harvest. Slowly, the north of the county is opening up to outsiders, like its many flowers unfolding their leaves to the warming sun – for this coastal strip has the driest climate in the whole of Ireland. Proof of this, if needed, are the glass- house estates found particularly on the outskirts of Rush – a name ill-chosen to reflect its peace and comparative tranquillity of life. Until recently, Rush prided itself on having a thatched post-office. Only re-location caused it 26. The Old Lighthouse, Balbriggan to be so no longer, but hidden in the villages and along the roadsides of North Dublin are still-surviving low-thatched houses which recall the halcyon days in the nineteenth century when Alexander Williams first discovered the romance in Fingal’s landscape – long before Paul Kelly began to give it his own painterly identity and, with his eye for the telling detail, emphasise the colour and light that are present there in such abundance. But if there is anything which encapsulates the charm and character of Fingal, it is surely the little harbours which punctuate the indented coastline with almost the same frequency as the Martello Towers which still guard one another all along the coast, in full view of the occasional inquisitive seal surfacing to keep an equally watchful eye on us curious humans. Balbriggan, Skerries, Loughshinny, Rush and Rogerstown all have their harbour walls projecting out to give shelter to small fishing boats which, when stranded on the sand at low tide, make one reflect that the piers were probably built more to give employment than to provide fishermen with access to the sea even when the tide is out. Surely a whiff of foreign parts is to be sensed here, for those picturesque marine idylls are so reminiscent of Cornish fisher-havens that one is tempted to pun and call the Fingal seaboard the Irish Corniche. What Paul Kelly paints is the essence of Fingal – not fantasy or fiction, but existing fact which is there for all of us to see, a landscape which – with his own unique vision – he has now managed to raise to the level of a new art form. Dr. Peter Harbison

16 The Artist in his studio

17 25. Cutting Hay, County Meath

18 5. Holding the Horses

19 61. A Summer Garden, Ardgillan

20 43. Sunday Afternoon, Ardgillan

21 Catalogue Measurements in inches, height precedes width. All paintings are signed. GALLERY I

1. ‘Threshing Fair, Moynalty’ Oil on board 8 × 10 Illustrated inside front cover

2. ‘Evening Paddle, Rush’ Oil on board 10 × 14 Illustrated page 34

3. ‘Sunday Afternoon, Collon Fair’ Oil on canvas 24 × 30 33. The Harbour at Balbriggan Illustrated front cover

4. ‘Thatching near Slane’ 5. ‘Holding the Horses’ × Oil on canvas 30 40 Oil on canvas 24 × 30 Illustrated page 26 Illustrated page 19

6. ‘Reflections, Evening, Rush’ Oil on board 9 × 12

7. ‘Looking towards Skerries’ Oil on board 6 × 8 Illustrated page 10

8. ‘Sunny Afternoon, Kerry Coast’ Oil on board 6 × 8

9. ‘Low Tide, Loughshinny Harbour Oil on canvas 30 × 45

Illustrated page 5 37. Watching Boats, Skerries

22 10. ‘Fields near Rush Golf Club’ Oil on board 6 × 8

11. ‘Evening in the Fields, Rush’ Oil on board 6 × 8

12. ‘End of the Day, Balbriggan Harbour’ Oil on canvas 30 × 45

Illustrated page 32

13. ‘Vegetable Shop, Chapelizod’ Oil on canvas 20 × 24

Illustrated page 31

14. ‘Playing on the Shore’ 18. Cattle, Valentia, County Kerry Oil on board 10 × 12

Illustrated page 33 16. ‘Playing in the Sand’ Oil on board 10 × 12 15. ‘Fishing, Winter Morning, Rush Oil on board 12 × 16 17. ‘Paddle Pools, Rush’ Illustrated page 33 Oil on board 8 × 12

GALLERY II

18. ‘Cattle, Valentia, County Kerry’ Watercolour on paper 8 × 10

Illustrated above

19. ‘Threshing Engine, Moynalty Fair’ Watercolour on paper 8 × 10

Illustrated left

20. ‘Cattle, County Kerry × 19. Threshing Engine, Moynalty Fair Watercolour on paper 8 10

23 21. ‘After Rain, County Wexford’ Watercolour on paper 8 × 10

22. ‘Day at the Seaside, Rush’ Oil on board 10 × 14

23. ‘Unloading the Catch, Balbriggan’ Oil on board 12 × 16

24. ‘Farm Animals, Donabate’ Oil on canvas 40 × 50

Illustrated page 27

25. ‘Cutting Hay, County Meath’ Oil on canvas 20 × 24 38. Fishing Grounds, Skerries Illustrated page 18

27. ‘Sunset, Rogerstown, Rush’ 26. ‘The Old Lighthouse, Balbriggan’ Oil on board 10 × 14 Oil on board 9 × 12 Illustrated page 13 Illustrated page 16

28. ‘Rock Pools, Rush’ Oil on board 10 × 14

29. ‘Loughshinny Harbour’ Oil on board 10 × 14

Illustrated left

30. ‘Rowing on the Liffey Oil on canvas 20 × 24

Illustrated page 29

31. ‘Rowers by a Jetty, Islandbridge Oil on canvas 30 × 24

Illustrated page 28 29. Loughshinny Harbour

24 32. ‘Liffey Rower’ Oil on canvas 20 × 24

Illustrated page 29

33. ‘The Harbour at Balbriggan’ Oil on board 10 × 12

Illustrated page 22

34. ‘Evening, Balbriggan Harbour’ Oil on canvas 20 × 24

Illustrated on back cover

35. ‘Moored Boats, Balbriggan’ Oil on board 10 × 12 68. Spring Morning, Prague

GALLERY III (Downstairs) 37. ‘Watching Boats, Skerries’ Watercolour on paper 10 × 14 36. ‘Kerry Strand’ Watercolour on paper 6 × 8 Illustrated page 22

Illustrated page 11 38. ‘Fishing Grounds, Skerries’ Watercolour on paper 6 × 8

Illustrated page 24

39. ‘Snowscene, Skerries’ Watercolour on paper 6 × 8

40. ‘Returning to Shore, Skerries Oil on canvas 16 × 20

41. ‘Playing on the Strand, County Kerry’ Oil on canvas 24 × 30

Illustrated page 9

55. Playing in the Snow, Rush

25 42. ‘Chickens in an Orchard’ Oil on board 8 × 7

43. ‘Sunday Afternoon, Ardgillian’ Oil on canvas 20 × 24

Illustrated page 21

44. ‘Low Tide, Loughshinny Harbour’ Oil on canvas 20 × 24

45. ‘Afternoon Stroll, Skerries Harbour’ Oil on canvas 24 × 30

Illustrated page 6

46. ‘First Boat Home, Skerries’ Oil on canvas 20 × 24

Illustrated page 30 4. Thatching near Slane

47. ‘Fishing on the Liffey’ × 51. ‘Quayside, Howth Harbour’ Oil on canvas 20 24 Oil on canvas 20 × 24 Illustrated page 32 52. ‘Mending Nets, Skerries’ Oil on board 12 × 16 48. ‘Cows near Valentia, County Kerry’ Oil on board 9 × 12 53. ‘Pipe Band, Rush’ Illustrated page 8 Watercolour on paper 6 × 8

49. ‘Cattle on a Hill, Sneem, County Kerry’ × 54. ‘Winter Afternoon, Skerries Strand’ Oil on board 12 16 Watercolour on paper 8 × 10

50. ‘Red Boats, Balbriggan’ × 55. ‘Playing in the Snow, Rush’ Oil on board 12 16 Oil on canvas 24 × 30

Illustrated page 14 Illustrated page 25

26 56. ‘Cowshed’ Oil on board 9 × 12

57. ‘Pony Ride, Prague’ Oil on board 8 × 10

Illustrated page 12

58. ‘Sunlight on the Water, Howth’ Oil on canvas 16 × 20

59. ‘Quiet Time, Loughshinny Harbour’ Oil on canvas 24 × 36

Illustrated page 4

60. ‘By the Liffey, Chapelizod’ Oil on canvas 16 × 20

61. ‘A Summer Garden, Ardgillan’ Oil on canvas 24 × 30 24. Farm Animals, Donabate

Illustrated page 20 67. ‘Charles Bridge, Prague’ × 62. ‘Tulip Fields, Rush’ Oil on board 6 8 Oil on canvas 24 × 30

Illustrated page 15 68. ‘Spring Morning, Prague’ Oil on board 10 × 14

63. ‘Cattle on a Hillside’ Illustrated page 25 Oil on board 9 × 12 69. ‘Skiers, Czech Republic’ × 64. ‘Cattle Grazing, County Kerry’ Oil on board 6 8 Oil on board 9 × 12 70. ‘Ski Slope, Czech Republic’ × 65. ‘Kerry Cows’ Oil on board 6 8 Oil on board 9 × 12

66. ‘Street Scene, Czech Republic’ Oil on board 6 × 8

27 31. Rowers by a Jetty, Islandbridge

28 30. Rowing on the Liffey

32. Liffey Rower

29 46. First Boat Home, Skerries

30 13. Vegetable Shop, Chapelizod

31 12. End of the Day, Balbriggan Harbour

47. Fishing on the Liffey

32 14. Playing on the Shore

15. Fishing, Winter Morning, Rush

33 2. Evening Paddle, Rush

34 NOTES GORRY GALLERY LTD., 20 MOLESWORTH STREET, DUBLIN 2. TELEPHONE and FAX 6795319 The Gallery is open Monday – Friday 11.00 a.m. – 6.00 p.m. Saturday (during Exhibition only) 11.00 a.m. – 2.00 p.m. www.gorrygallery.ie Origination and Printing by Brunswick Press Ltd.