Solo Exhibition 2015, Hyde Bridge Gallery, Sligo

Featured paintings based on the Hidden Glen at the foot of Knocknarea in county Sligo and an old garden loft from my home place in Marino, Dublin, which holds many childhood memories.

Excerpt from author Eoin MacNamee who performed the official opening :

‘There’s a sharpness in the Glen paintings. It’s the sharpness of spring and early summer, the colours and defined planes of light bringing the work to a kind of abstraction. The novelist John McGahern said that life should be told slant. In other words, the artist should be able to show us something that we've never seen before, find a new angle to it. Shay's Glen is almost a rain forest, but the piercing light reminds us that we're in Ireland. The ferns pushing towards the light bring us from a deep Sligo ravine right back to the tumbledown shed in a Marino garden. In the Glen the ferns are pushing towards the light. In the shed they are encapsulating decay and memory. The meticulously observed quality of light defines and separates the two series of paintings. This is virtuoso work, rigorously observed, beautifully executed. And we are grateful for it’.