163 / 170
163
George Campbell and the Belfast Boys 2015
Pamela Mathews (b.1931)
Born in Dublin, Pamela Norah Mathews was educated at Rathdown
School in Glenageary, where she was taught art classes by Lillian
Davidson, who commented on the young artist “She wouldn’t
be bad if she didn’t talk so much”! After leaving School, Pamela
attended the National College of Art, but found it too academic
and restrictive. One day out walking with her mother she
spotted paintings by George Campbell in the window of the Victor
Waddington Galleries in South Anne Street. Pamela’s mother
arranged for George Campbell to tutor Pamela in a makeshift
studio at the back of their family home at “Bartra” 56 Eglington Road, Donnybrook.
Pamela held a joint show with James MacIntyre in 1952 and 1953 in Belfast at The Gallery,
Donegall Place, Belfast, and in 1954 at the Dublin Painters Gallery. From 1951 to 1966, Mathews
exhibited regularly at the Irish Exhibition of Living Art from 1951 to 1966 and exhibited several
images from her trip to Roundstone in the Dublin Painters in 1955 and 1956. Encouraged to travel
to Spain by the Campbell’s, Pamela stayed with George and Madge Campbell in Torremolinos.
Mathews continued to travel to Italy to Milan to study at Brera, where her style of painting
changed to abstract. Travelling south, and on to Rome, she continued her studies at the Academia
di Belle Arte. In 1956, she exhibited at the Irish Club, Eaton Square with Gretta Bowen, George
Campbell and Gerard Dillon.
In 1962 the artist traveled to New York and spent most of the year traveling and exhibiting her
paintings including the Ruth White Gallery on 42 East 57th Street. In 1964 she held her first
solo show with Leo Smith at the Dawson Gallery. Opened by novelist Mary Lavin, the exhibition
received positive media comments..... “This show lifts her without effort into the front rank of
Irish Women Painters…”
Becoming a wife to a surgeon and mother of two children in 1965 restricted her life as an artist,
but she continues to take an interest in the development of art in Ireland and in Europe today.
Gretta Bowen (1880-1981)
The mother of George Campbell, Bowen took up painting shortly
before her seventieth birthday, using materials belonging to her
son, Arthur. In 1955 the Council for the Encouragement of Music
and the Arts - the forerunner of the Arts Council of Northern
Ireland - organised her first solo exhibition. “Rhythm and
movement are the characteristics of her work...and whatever she
paints conveys a feeling of happiness, of brightness, of delight
in life” - The Times 29th December 1955. Other solo exhibitions
followed in Belfast and Dublin between the1960s and 1980s.
‘She ignored conventional linear perspective in favour of horizontal arrangements
reminiscent of medieval manuscripts and tapestries. She tended not to mix her colours,
taking them straight from the tube and drawing directly with the brush. Her subject was
everyday life, enhanced by childhood memory. No time for introspection here; her subjects
are living life rather than contemplating it.’