Correspondences- selected works by T.P.Flanagan

Liam Kelly

    Research output: Book/ReportBookpeer-review

    Abstract

    T.P. Flanagan, who has been exhibiting now for some five decades, is largely recognised as an important landscape artist of his generation and particularly counties Sligo, Donegal and his native Fermanagh have drawn him in. While his paintings often celebrate the formal features and natural elements at work in a landscape some also embrace and rinse up social and political undercurrents invested in a terrain. Still life and figurative works also feature in his oeuvre and this exhibition and catalogue, curated and written by Liam Kelly, sets out to bring together and explore sub- themes in paintings and drawings which relate, inter alia, to nostalgia, loss and the dignity of silence. . In ‘A Fermanagh Elegy’ (1971) he dealt indirectly with the legacy of frozen attitudes in N.Ireland and the dignity of silence in ‘A Rose Wrapped Up’ (1973-75) series. He also chose to draw upon the emotive power of Nicholas Pousin’s ‘Echo and Narcissus’ to pay tribute to the murdered Judge McBurney in ‘Victim’ ( 1975, Arts Council collection), the neo-classical disposition of the figure recognising all victims, regardless of time and place. While TP Flanagan celebrates the formal features of landscape without including the human figure, as Seamus Heaney has said ‘ …the pictures typically imply nature by human visitation’. There is a recognition in the artist’s work that the landscape has already been worked culturally as well as physically. In Flanagan’s practice the land is an interactive site between nature and culture. This selection of works, including some still lives, form sub-themes in his oeuvre and attempts to set up and draw out interactions , quiet interrogations and correspondences that percolate to and within the surfaces of his canvases.
    Original languageEnglish
    PublisherOrmeau Baths
    Number of pages48
    ISBN (Print)978-09540086-9-7
    Publication statusPublished (in print/issue) - 2010

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