Latest news with #watercolour
Irish Times
08-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Creative escapes: ‘A studio isn't a luxury – it's a necessity'
Settings don't get much more scenic than watercolour artist Edel Treacy's studio in Inistioge, Co Kilkenny. Dating back more than 300 years, the small stone outbuilding is located on a dairy farm, which has been in her husband Luke's family for generations. 'It's looking particularly beautiful this morning,' says Treacy, who has dropped her three sons (aged nine, seven and five) at school, made a coffee and taken 'about five steps to the art shed', from her house to work on a commission. 'There's inspiration everywhere around here. Beside my studio there's a lane full of hedges, greenery, bluebells, primroses, bees and birdsong.' Inside the single-storey building, there's a vaulted ceiling, small traditional windows, plus new roof windows installed by a neighbour. The walls are made from exposed stone, native to the area, and the concrete floor allows for paint spillages. READ MORE Artist Edel Treacy at her home studio in Coolraney, Inistioge, Thomastown, Co. Kilkenny. Photo: Bryan O'Brien / The Irish Times 'It's not the brightest space, but there's a softness to the light and it gets a lot of sun,' says Treacy. 'When my dad saw it, he said, 'You can mess away in there to your heart's content Edel.'' Working from home is nothing new for many artists, who were operating from kitchen tables, spare bedrooms and draughty garages long before lockdown. A rented studio space seems increasingly out of reach for a lot of Irish creatives, with the housing crisis, rising costs and the closure of a number of shared workspaces in recent years. But despite the challenges, carving out space to make art is as vital as ever; whether it's in a 'room of one's own', to borrow Virginia Woolf 's phrase, or just a quiet corner. Work of artist Edel Treacy at her home studio in Inistioge, Co. Kilkenny. Photograph: Bryan O'Brien/The Irish Times In winter, Treacy prefers to work in the warmth of her house. But she enjoys the separation between the two buildings. 'I can walk out the front door, leave housework or laundry behind, and just get engrossed'. Rural life has also aided her creative practice. 'The farmer shows up every day to the farm, no matter what's going on, so I show up every day to my art,' she says. 'Even if it's for five or 10 minutes, that discipline has made me better.' There are some drawbacks to living in a rural idyll. 'I'm incredibly lucky, but sometimes you miss the city as an artist – the people, cafes, galleries and art shops,' Treacy admits. From the sounds of things though, the art shed can be fairly bustling. Treacy shares it with her husband if he's working remotely, and her sons pop in to paint or draw at a little picnic table beside her. Edel Treacy's home studio in Coolraney, Inistioge, Thomastown, Co. Kilkenny. Photo: Bryan O'Brien / The Irish Times 'The boys sometimes knock something over and run off, but they usually leave me to it. Once or twice, they've signed a piece with their own name and I have to start again. But they're actually very inspiring,' says the remarkably patient Treacy, who also job-shares as a primary schoolteacher. 'They enhance my creativity because they're so playful.' Spare bedroom studio Georgina O'Hanlon's illustration, which she produces in a room in her Dublin home. At first glance, illustrator Georgina O'Hanlon's studio is very different from Treacy's rustic outbuilding. A converted spare bedroom in the artist's semidetached house in Whitehall, Dublin 9, its view isn't of flower-filled lanes, or rolling valleys, but other homes in a quiet cul-de-sac. North Dublin might seem like a less romantic location than Inistioge, but O'Hanlon has created a light-filled, joyful workspace, adorned with her nature and folklore-inspired designs. She hand-draws at a desk by the window, scans the illustrations into her computer, and sends them to be printed or woven in Europe. Seamstresses in Stoneybatter then turn the colourful fabric into Italian silk kaftans, cushions, hair accessories and blankets. Georgina O'Hanlon O'Hanlon's latest collection, Fairytales on Silk, recalls magical childhood summers with her grandmother in Co Clare. But she insists she has plenty of access to nature in her urban location, wandering through the park or nearby Botanic Gardens when she needs 'brain candy'. 'I'm close enough to the energy of town when I need it, but day to day, I get to enjoy the slower pace of local life,' says the artist, who purchased the house last year with her husband. The couple are expecting their first child in July. Cushions based on Georgina O'Hanlon's illustrations O'Hanlon does miss meeting fellow creatives in shared studios, and with no commute, 'there's no clear line between where your day begins and ends'. The National College of Art and Design graduate previously worked in shared spaces such as Moxie Studios, which closed in 2014. She then rented a studio space in the city, which proved expensive. She's fully aware of how fortunate she is as an artist to have this workspace – 'a haven' – and her own home in the capital. 'Compared to artists in regional areas, the pressure in Dublin is particularly acute. The cost of living, the scarcity of space, and the absence of long-term support mean that many have simply had to leave the field,' O'Hanlon says. 'A studio isn't a luxury – it's a necessity. It's a space to spread ideas out, to see them fully, to build on them. Yet the infrastructure just isn't there. The whole situation feels deeply disheartening. Artists are expected to leap without a safety net, and for many, that leap is simply too far.' Garden room art Lorraine Coll's garden studio For the Derry-based contemporary abstract artist Lorraine Coll, the challenges of working from home can be seen in her livingroom – but only if you look very closely. 'I've scrubbed the walls, the blinds – and don't lift the rug!' laughs Coll, whose beautiful, striking paintings can take a month to create and employ a range of techniques – such as burning paint with a hot gun to add texture. A graduate of Manchester School of Art, Coll worked as an artist in Manchester 'from the kitchen table in our flat'. She returned to her hometown in 2013 and got a job with the local library service. After taking a career break due to baby loss, Coll took up painting again. Returning to her passion proved therapeutic, and demand for Coll's pieces began to increase. Working from home made sense from a cost perspective, but as an artist who loves to 'work big', and with prospective customers wanting to view the paintings, the small, dark livingroom wasn't fit for purpose. In 2022, garden rooms were enjoying a surge in popularity post-lockdown. Coll decided to invest, enlisting a local company to build the stand-alone structure in her back garden. Hedges were cleared, Coll's son gave up his trampoline (happily – 'football was taking over anyway') to make space, and her husband installed the electrics, plastering and flooring to save money. Lorraine Coll works in her garden studio The 3.8m x 3.2m space has large double doors to let in plenty of light, low-maintenance vinyl flooring, and paint-splattered walls which currently display two large canvases with moody burgundy hues, florescent pinks and oranges. 'They're at the 'ugly stage' where I'm building up vibrant colours underneath,' Coll says. 'I'll layer them up and they'll look totally different at the end.' The traditional model of selling at art fairs, or to galleries, is changing. Most of Coll's sales now come via social media and her website. She has recouped her spend on the garden room, and it's also added value to her home. 'I've sent pieces to Australia, America, and connected with people all over the world,' Coll says. 'It's lovely to be able to do that from my back garden in Derry.' ; ;
The Guardian
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The ‘dangerous' Australian women whose art was dismissed, forgotten – and even set on fire
When Justine Kong Sing stepped off a steamship into Edwardian London, the Nundle-born daughter of a Chinese merchant could tell straight away she was a long way from Australia: amid the 'roar and rush' of the city, no one seemed to notice her. 'In the colonies, where foreigners are treated differently, an Oriental suffers keenly the mortification of being stared at, and often assaulted, because of his color!' she wrote in a widely published account. But the 43-year-old soon attracted a different kind of attention, studying at the Westminster School of Art and exhibiting at London's Royal Academy and the Paris Salon. Basing herself in Chelsea, her specialty was watercolour-on-ivory miniature portraits, painting 'London Society beauties' and a Chinese minister's wife. But one pocket-sized piece, painted in 1912 – soon after she arrived in England – and titled simply Me, has Kong Sing herself staring quizzically at the viewer, eyebrow arched and head tilted under a green hat. Kong Sing's known body of work is tiny in almost every sense, and for the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA) curator Elle Freak, she remains an 'enigma'. Freak is a co-curator of Dangerously Modern: Australian Women Artists in Europe 1890-1940, an expansive new exhibition co-presented by AGSA and the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Some of the 50 featured artists are already icons: the Archibald-winning face of Nora Heysen; the gentle cubism of Dorrit Black; Margaret Preston's still life studies; and the vivid, stippled colours of Grace Cossington Smith. But many, like Kong Sing, are being salvaged from obscurity. 'That's been the challenge of the whole project,' Freak says. 'Especially these artists who were working internationally, trying to trace their movements, trying to find their works that sold overseas. 'There are some artists along the way where we've come across a work and it's the only example that we really know.' Freak and co-curators Tracey Lock and Wayne Tunnicliffe spent years mapping this intergenerational movement of women who traded the antipodes for Bohemian melting pots in Bloomsbury and Chelsea, or Paris's left bank. From the late 19th century they abandoned the parochial constraints of the home and the homeland to make their own way on and off the canvas. For Victorian-born Agnes Goodsir, Paris was a place where 'art is something more than a polite hobby'. While Goodsir made a living from conventional commissions, Freak says her private works are often 'subtly subversive and coated with sapphic symbolism'. 'She really was committed to this emotional form of realism, where she was more interested in the mood of her sitter,' Freak says. Often that sitter was Cherry: the nickname of Rachel Dunn, a divorced American musician and Goodsir's long-term partner, who is seen in works such as 1925's Girl with cigarette. Goodsir was pipped to be the first Australian woman elected to the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts by Bessie Davidson, an Adelaide-born artist who also became the vice-president of the Société des Femmes Artistes Modernes. Davidson's painting Intérieur (interior) was also completed in Paris in 1925, and turns the familiar trope of a bedroom scene into a site of intimacy and liberation; we see a hairbrush teetering on the edge of a dresser, a nude study perched above the unmade bed – and the reflection of Davidson's French partner Marguerite Le Roy just visible in a mirror. 'You get a sense that a moment has just passed,' Freak says. Dangerously Modern's focus is deliberately blurry; Australian and New Zealand-born expatriates are placed alongside inbound migrants, reflecting a decoupling from a notion of national identity that resurgent – and male-led – art movements back home were trying to galvanise. Freak and her colleagues trace more subtle points of convergence and exchange: Kong Sing once shared a Sydney studio with Florence Rodway; oils by Hilda Rix Nicholas and Ethel Carrick respond to exoticised colours and markets of Tangier, Morocco and Kairouan, Tunisia; and Girl in the sunshine, by New Zealand-born Edith Collier, was painted in the Irish village of Bunmahon, as part of a 1915 summer class led by Margaret Preston. A trio of paintings by Dorrit Black, Grace Crowley and Anne Dangar each capture a different view of the French village Mirmande – all three painted on the same field excursion in the summer of 1928. 'You've got the Irish moment, you've got a Mirmande moment, you've got your circle of artists in the Latin Quarter in Paris, all living in close contact with one another,' Freak says. In fact, Bowen and Davidson 'lived in the very same apartment building, and Bowen referred to Davidson as 'the old Australian impressionist on the top floor''. For artists who bucked tradition, borders, and convention, their often cool reception back home and subsequent omission from the Australian canon was structural, geographic and political. The show's title comes from Thea Proctor, who was amused to be regarded as 'dangerously modern' upon her homecoming in 1926. Freak and her co-curators also point to the art historian Bernard Smith's dismissive labelling of female expatriate artists as mere 'messenger girls' in 1988. Some works were literally too hot to handle; it's hard to picture a stronger expression of patriarchal suppression than the day Collier arrived home to find her father had burned a series of her boundary-pushing nudes. (A rare survivor appears in Dangerously Modern, making its first Australian appearance.) For Goodsir, at least, her love and muse ensured her legacy would be waiting once Australia caught up. 'After Goodsir passed away, Cherry sent her works back to Australia and said to keep them until audiences were ready – and then to distribute them more widely,' Freak says. Kong Sing died in Sydney in 1960, having eventually returned to 'the colonies' after two decades in England and Spain; a niece donated Me to AGNSW the following year. Now, elevated into an alternative Australian canon, Kong Sing has another opportunity to turn heads in her home country for her watercolours – not her complexion. Dangerously Modern: Australian Women Artists in Europe 1890–1940 is showing at AGSA until 7 September, and AGNSW from 11 October 11 to 1 February 2026
The Guardian
18-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Turner's rarely seen watercolours take centre stage in Bath
It is, says the curator Ian Warrell, a little like peering over JMW Turner's shoulder as he puzzles out how to create the sweeping land and seascapes that made him one of the greatest ever. An exhibition of the artist's rarely seen watercolours is opening in Bath, which includes scenes of the English West Country that he created as a teenager to a series of sketched seascapes when he was a much older man gazing out at storms off the Kent coast. Called Impressions in Watercolour, the exhibition gives insight into Turner's methods and serves a reminder of how important he was as a bridge between earlier landscape painting and the radical abstraction of the 20th century. The first of the 32 Turner watercolours on show at the Holburne Museum from Friday 23 May were painted in the early 1790s when the artist was about 16 or 17. One is a view of Bath from a hill made to look much more craggy than the actual rolling landscape around the Georgian city. Next to it is another West Country view, the romantic ruins of Malmesbury Abbey in Wiltshire. Both show Turner's interest in the 'theory of the sublime' that came to the fore later in his sea storms and mountain scenes. 'It was all very conventional at this stage,' said Warrell, a Turner specialist. 'But you can see he is ambitious.' A highlight of the exhibition is a series of seascapes that Turner painted as a much more mature artist in Margate, Kent. Warrell said: 'He'd been to Margate as a child because London was so polluted that his family sent him to school there, and then he went back again from the 1820s repeatedly. 'He'd look out from his lodgings out on to the beach and see the sun rising and setting and the boats and all the goings on. Turner said the skies over Margate and that area were the best in Europe, better than the Bay of Naples. The more turbulent the weather … the happier he was. 'All the time he's experimenting. Some of these watercolours are very simple meditations. Some probably would only have taken him no more than half an hour.' Unlike the great Turner paintings such as The Fighting Temeraire, which is viewed by hundreds of thousands of people every year, these pictures are from private collections and are rarely seen or reproduced. They show how he continued to play with and refine themes and feelings. A Steamboat and Crescent Moon was sketched in Margate in about 1845, seven years after he painted The Fighting Temeraire, but a squiggle of smoke harks back to the fiery funnel in the grand oil painting. 'All the time he's doing this, he's training his hand and eye, coordinating, trying ideas that he might use,' Warrell said. 'It's bold and his colour is different to anybody's work at that time. He doesn't always use the widest range of colours but the yellows and blues are very distinctive. He's trying to capture a moment or just the atmosphere of that moment.' Also featured in the exhibition are the artist's contemporaries, including Thomas Girtin, who like Turner was born 250 years ago in 1775, and John Sell Cotman. The exhibition runs from 23 May until 14 September.
