The work in the exhibition is inspired by three different places: the farm in East Donegal where Ann Quinn grew up; Dublin City, where she was based for twenty years; and the wild prairie near the Ragdale Foundation in Illinois where she completed an artist residency in autumn 2016. She has recently returned to live in her native Donegal, and the paintings were made in her new studio there.

Most of her new paintings contain a human being in the midst of the space. These figures are the focal point of the composition, while her previous work was more about the actual landscape. The people who feature in the pictures are human beings she has encountered and photographed. These acquaintances range from brief coincidental sightings and meetings to more close and meaningful relations like her parents. The human presence impacts on the atmospheres of the paintings through the emotions they project, consciously or unconsciously.

The American writer Elissa Favero, who spent time at the Ragdale Foundation with Quinn, has written of the work:

I see into so many of these paintings as I would into windows. Some are fleeting views, snapshots really. Here, for instance, a barbershop observed on the way to catch the train into Chicago. I peer into a forever-stilled, intimate moment between old men. Or here an elderly woman pushing her walker among portraits in a gallery. Like the framed paintings behind her (past selves, perhaps, or the unrealized possibilities of the ladies she might have become but didn’t on account of history or circumstance), she’s on view as well. Other paintings here by Ann have the appearance of deep space and time, as in the layered, loving portrait of her parents seen through a parlor window. At her newly finished house and studio in Donegal, Ann writes, she has twenty-seven windows and seventeen doors from which to see out, from which to look in.

Promo video: https://youtu.be/5Vm-P2JPwOQ • Preview the first few pages of the catalogue: http://www.blurb.com/b/8859795-the-human-presence • Artist website: http://www.annquinn.org