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Norah McGuinness HRHA (1901-1980)
Lapwings at Balbriggan
Oil on canvas, 50 x 70cm (20 x 28”)
Signed
Exhibited: “Norah McGuinness Exhibition”,The Dawson Gallery, Dublin, Sept
1975, Cat. No. 25, where purchased
Exhibited at one of McGuinness’s last one-woman shows at the Dawson Gallery,
Lapwings at Balbriggan
deals with a favourite subject of the artist, birds on the
seashore. Living at York Road in Dun Laoghaire, the artist frequented the beaches
of county Dublin from which she created a series of studies of gulls, lapwings and
seabirds feeding on the damp marshlands of the bay. This work is based on the
coastline of north county Dublin. As James White put it, ‘
The sandy shores and white
Irish skies were her constant backgrounds and skill and know-howwere her brushstrokes’
.
[1]
Her earliest landscapes were painted on site in the open air but paintings such as
this are primarily studio works. Distilled from chalk sketches and colour notes, it
shows McGuinness more preoccupied with
‘describing only the essential features and
details of the scene’
[2]
, rather than creating a conventional topographical landscape.
Using a high viewpoint the features of the view are laid out.Its details are condensed
into a series of strong interlocking shapes and colours. The undulating line of the
water and sea is contained by the distant green coastline and the yellow sandbanks.
The schematised forms of the birds with their strange crested heads and the
decorative colours and details of the stones and the grasses in the foreground lend
the scene a distinctly exotic aura. Above all the intense yellow, harmonised with
greens and browns, transforms a familiar sight into a vibrant painting, evocative of
the intense sense of modernity that lies at the heart of McGuinness’s work.
Dr. Róisín Kennedy, March 2014
[1]
James White
Norah McGuinness. An Appreciation
, Irish Times, 24 November
1980.
[2]
Anne Crookshank,
Norah McGuinness Retrospective
Exhibition, Trinity College
Dublin, 1968.
€8,000 - 12,000
