Working between the north Mayo coast and his Dublin studio, the landscape in Eddie Kennedy’s paintings is invariably a stepping stone to something else rather than an end in itself, writes Aidan Dunne
As the Scottish artist Barbara Rae wrote of Eddie Kennedy’s work: ‘In my mind’s eye I associate Eddie with the sea, but that is because for me his haunting work is often drenched with symbolic shoreline imagery.’ Drenched is a good word. His paintings are usually suffused with a vivid, watery light, charged with the atmospheric liveliness of the coastline. The coastline in this case being the strands and stony ramparts of north Mayo as they meet the vast, unrelenting Atlantic. Attentiveness to the scale, rhythms and patterns of the sea and the towering, restless skies above it is evident in the pulse and flow of his paintings.
Rose Jane Leigh’s importance as an early pioneering Wexford landscape painter and her choice of studying in Antwerp placed her at the centre of the major art movements of the 19th and early 20th century, writes Mary Stratton Ryan
