Adam's Important Irish Art September 26th 2018

24 18 PATRICK SCOTT HRHA (1921-2014) Silver Painting (10/90) Tempera and silver leaf on canvas, 122 x 122cm (48 x 48’’) Signed and inscribed verso Patrick Scott began his trademark Silver and Gold paintings on unprimed canvas as long ago as the early 1970s. The great orbs in silver or gold emerged from similar painted forms that were assumed to refer to the sun and the moon. This was especially the case when planet earth seemed to be threatened by destruction through nuclear activity following the bombings at the end of World War II, and in Ireland, proposals to build a nuclear reactor in County Wexford. Scott though, despite a consistent interest in the environment, was even more psychically connected to the basic forms of circles, squares, cubes and combinations of these architectural and geometric elements. Self-taught as a painter, his professional training was in architecture and design and led straight to an appointment in the offices of Michael Scott and Robin Walker, where his design skills were immediately put to effective and varied use in projects such as Bus Aras, theatre designs for the Abbey Theatre, uniforms for Coras Iompar Eireann, and Christmas lighting for Grafton Street. Scott was an idealist. His art has been dedicated to the sublime and the elemental - the perfect geometric forms that he, like Plato, believed to lie beneath every aspect of our world. For Scott, that also meant the materials used to embody those forms. Looking to the Italians of the Early Renaissance on the one hand and Japanese Zen design on the other, he magicked landscapes out of elemental forms, using real gold, silver or palladium leaf which he attached to pure, unprimed canvases so firmly that he could take the garden hose to them without damaging their glittering surfaces. Silver Painting (10/90) was made in 1990, the same year in which he painted Sun Window and Moon Window . All three share the same square format, the same dimensions and the simple combination of an orb hovering seductively above an architectural element. Everything is in its proper place. Nothing remains to be said. Scott won numerous awards during his long career, was elected Saoi of Aosdana and his work can be found in all Irish major collections as well as in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Joseph H. Hirshhorn Museum, Wash- ington, the European Parliament, Strasbourg, the Mitsubishi Bank, Tokyo and many national and international private and corporate collections. Catherine Marshall, August 2018 € 8,000 - 12,000 Paintings from the Brian and Anne Friel Collection