'RACHEL STRONG' by Claire Huberson

A growing figure of the Irish painting world, the Dubliner Rachel Strong was an artist whose work comes from a visceral need to express herself and the tough life she experienced. Daughter of the Irish poet Eithne Strong, her father Rupert introduced psychoanalysis in Ireland. As she grew up in his environment, the paintings of this astounding and innovative artist have a deep psychological meaning.

The self-taught artist was influenced by German expressionnism and the self-called “New Objectivists” (such as George Grosz) who decided to “look at the things the way they are”.

Rachel was the muse of the famous Irish painter Graham Knuttel (who has brought the human imagery back into central focus in Ireland) from the mid 1980s up to the early 1990s. Her work has strongly been inspired by this relationship, as shown for instance by the so specific nose and the almond eyes Graham is used to give to his characters. Again, as the one of Graham Knuttel, her work is highly stylized, especially her self-portraits, dramatic, almost heraldic. Yet she painted in her own way, her point of view being much more feminine. She was indeed committed into depicting some parts of the woman’s social condition. The world she depicts in her paintings is her own, the one of a woman broken by life. Realizing many self-portraits, Rachel was astonishingly honest and never tried to hide the tough sides of her experiences such as prostitution or her addiction to heroin.

Her figurative work was always of a narrative content, as if she was telling us a part of the story of her characters, a life as colourful as frightening. Her characters indeed stare at you with an uncommon intensity which helps the viewer sharing her feelings.

“Sulking” landscapes, Rachel nonetheless liked painting still lives too, in which her shocking, jarring colours dominate over lines as in her whole work.

Rachel Strong died in october 2003 in her very early fifties, exhausted by the life she endured. Her work is today of an inestimable value.

'Belief' A Poem by Maureen Charlton

Mankind and the universe have got along
Ever since the world was young
I believe May blossoms will bloom in May
Just as they did in Shakespeare's day
Bluebells will still bloom anew
Flaunting their heads of bluest blue
Nature is wiser than us all
It knows the month when chestnuts fall
We should not take as too alarming
Those grim portents of global warming
Listen ! Who is that glorious sining bird ?
It is the lark that Homer heard

Art & The Law

Good article by London Times journalist and media lawyer Alex Wade on the relationship between Art & the Law.

http://alexwade.com/articles/20060905_art_and_the_law.html

Pottermania Hits Dawson Street

Pottermania hit Dawson Street last night as fans of the bespeckled schoolboy magician queued patiently to get their 1st edition copy of the last tome in the series. Waterstones even changed its shop sign for the occasion, replacing its famous moniker with that of the fictional book emporium where Harry and his friends purchase their school books at the beginning of each term. Some commentators have taken a negative tone with their coverage of the books and the popularity surrounding them but we think that any writer who can get people to wait patiently in a queue in the middle of the night for hours on end to buy a book is a good and inspiring thing and in this age of the Xbox, Web.20 and Wii, is, dare we say it, magical.

An Open letter from Kathy Sinnott MEP to John Gormley TD

NB: The photograph above shows Green Party TDs Trevor Sargent and Ciaran Cuffe holding the 'Save Tara' banner during a protest march against the chosen route of the M3 Motorway at Tara. The photograph was taken in November 2004. How times change...

Dear John Gormley
TD,
20/07/07


At our meeting on Wednesday 27^th June, you told the petitions committee
that you would make the entire Tara file public. I as vice president of
the committee and my fellow members have been waiting to receive a copy,
but as yet you have not provided one.



When do you intend to do this? Had it been done sooner we would have
known that the government has been put on notice by the European
Commission that the Environmental Impact Assessment for the whole M3
project is no longer valid thus making it unlawful.



Further, the European Commission has informed you it is challenging the
National Monuments Act on which the continuation of the M3 project in
its present route is based. Had you opened the file as promised and in a
timely manner rather than leaving me to unearth the truth only recently,
the public would have discovered that the government is in the European
Court of Justice this autumn over the current illegality of the M3
project and clearly road works should be halted until the ECJ makes its
ruling. The NRA would also have been unable to claim ignorance of the
illegality of the project as they are currently doing.



With this in mind, I must demand that you open the entire Tara/M3 file
to the public as promised and that you do so now. In the interest of the
transparency and dedication to our environment we all hoped your party
would bring to this government, I insist that you release the Tara/M3
file to the public, the petitions committee and to me.



Tara is a treasure which cannot be replaced, I would have hoped that you
would move heaven and earth to preserve it. If you are willing to
sacrifice Tara, what hope have we of preserving anything else?



Yours in hope



*Kathy Sinnott MEP*

021 4888793

kathysinnott@iol.ie

'Leonardo Comes To Town' by Frederico Bertelli

From June 13^th to august 12^th The Chester Beatty Library will display the Codex Leicester an autograph manuscript by Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) containing his observations on the nature and properties of water as well as other aspects of science and technology. Of particular interests is the correlation between science and painting that spreads from these pages. In particular, if we look at the Leonardo’s “treaty about painting” this idea emerges with particular strength:

Scienza è detto quel discorso mentale il quale ha origine da' suoi ultimi principî, de' quali in natura null'altra cosa si può trovare che sia parte di essa scienza, come nella quantità continua, cioè la scienza di geometria, la quale, cominciando dalla superficie de' corpi, si trova avere origine nella linea, termine di essa superficie; ed in questo non restiamo satisfatti, perché noi conosciamo la linea aver termine nel punto, ed il punto esser quello del quale null'altra cosa può esser minore. Adunque il punto è il primo principio della geometria; e niuna altra cosa può essere né in natura, né in mente umana, che possa dare principio al punto

Treaty about painting – Volume 1

In brief the meaning of this passage is: science is a mental discourse that starts from geometry, which is about the study of volumes, areas and lines, and in final instance, of points. So are the points the starting point of geometry because nothing can be found either in nature or in the human mind as more axiomatic. But this straightforward idea can be also found if we look at the painting of Markey Robinson. Some critics sees him just as a good primitive, but this would just be reductive. It is true that the term primitive is often used in relation to Markey’s work, but primitive is also an elusive term. If we think at primitive as the works of untutored artists, yes, aspects of Markey’s work are naïve, but however, Markey’s mature work was too knowing to be just classified naïve: his works became more and more absorbed in exploring and communicating the essence of form and the mood and emotion beneath the surface of the paintings through strong volumes, structural control and sense of pattern. In particular Markey was interested in the shell of an old form not out of nostalgia for a lost Celtic Eden or because of romantic yearnings but because of the artistic potential for line, structure, color and mood. One of his favorite subject were cottages, because of their versatility. In particular cottages created great possibilities for line, because of their versatility. Cottages could be positioned together in informal groupings or they might visually echo the shapes of hills or mountains. They could be used in order to give a decorative “modern” flatness or to produce spatial relationships with other figure. With the cottage, Markey abstracted conventional imagery. He reinterpreted the landscape, creating new shapes, allowing him also to test the agility of his line. And in same way this is close to the Leonardian idea of geometry applied to painting.

'Markey Robinson' by Kevin Rafter, A Documentary

Following some excellent reviews, RTE Radio One now have Kevin Rafter's brilliant documentary on the life of Markey Robinson available as a podcast on their website.

http://www.rte.ie/radio1/doconone/1130382.html