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The Ib Jorgensen Collection 11
th
November 2014
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Charles Brady HRHA (1926-1997)
Turkish Delight
Oil on canvas on board, 28 x 39cm (11 x 15.4”)
Signed indistinctly; also signed, inscribed and dated ‘96 on canvas fragment verso
‘You have mood and I can’t teach mood and that’s power.” These were the words
spoken by John Groth which encouraged a young Charles Brady to continue with
his drawing courses in New York City, where he began his career as an artist in the
late 1940s. Finding the pace of New York too stressful, he moved to Ireland in 1956.
Settled in Lismore, he started painting the Irish landscape in a New York mode – what
was later called second-generation abstract expressionism. After a brief return to New
York, he settled permanently in Ireland in 1959, where he joined forces with Eoin
Walsh, Noel Sheridan, and Patrick Pye to form the Independent Artists. In the early
1960s he gave up landscape painting in favour of painting small objects. His subjects
are simplicity itself ‘more often than not, just an excuse to pick up a paintbrush’. Brady
insisted that he had to struggle for every effect often putting a piece away and rework-
ing it a year later.These small still lifes were to become his signature works. Exhibited
atThe Dawson Gallery in 1972,
Mrs. Deacon’s Bottle
, epitomises his mature style whilst
his
Dream Box,
painted in 1995 relates back to the landscapes he was painting in his
early days in New York
€1,500 - 2,000