Marie Lynch celebrates the life and work of illustrator and watercolour artist Naomi Heather
Fairy and mortal realms collide in Naomi Heather’s vivid imagination, drawing viewers into a fanciful world teeming with sprites, witches, elves and gnomes. The daughter of an English vicar, Heather was born in 1911 in the industrial town of Smethwick, and briefly attended classes at the Birmingham School of Art. She had family connections in County Waterford and, from the late 1930s, was a popular exhibitor at the annual Waterford Art Exhibitions, inaugurated by artist Hilda Roberts and her husband, Headmaster Arnold Marsh, at the Newtown School gymnasium. During the 1940s and 1950s, Heather exhibited regularly at the Munster Fine Art Club (MFAC), the Water Colour Society of Ireland (WCSI) and the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA).
To read this article in full, subscribe or buy this edition of the Irish Arts Review
Anne Stewart selects The Nativity by Baldassarre Peruzzi from the Ulster Museum collection
Kenneth McConkey recounts the story of how two great Irish painters, John Lavery and William Orpen, recorded the greatest ballerina of her generation, Anna Pavlova
St Mary’s Cathedral in Tuam, Co Galway is a veritable shrine of Romanesque art, writes Roger Stalley