This exhibition marks the artist’s return to still life paintings. In 2018, when reviewing the artist’s solo show ‘Road Trip’ for The Irish Times, art critic Aidan Dunne stated that ‘Frankel’s landscapes are modest, considered, beautifully judged and classical.’ Later that year, the same art critic included the show in his round-up of the best exhibitions of 2018. The same balanced comment could be made of this sumptuous series of new oil paintings on linen laid out on board.

For this show, I’ve focused my attention on the season of spring: on flowering things, plants opening and enlightening the world with their fresh beauty.

Everything is cyclical, and nothing ever lands. We go from winter to spring just like that, in a slow flow, around, again and again.

For these last few years things have felt like winter to me. Covid, then the wars began, and all was sprinkled with a sense of unreality: there was nothing to grip onto for sure, like the side of a boat that admits no one from a turbulent dark sea. Deepest darkest winter, now bookended with the onslaught of AI and climate change… deepest darkest winter… so what comes next, must be spring, right?

And so, with a sense of joy, this spring I reached for my brushes and began to focus on these things, as escapism, yes, but also as a logical step in a natural direction.

And I hope these paintings can fill people with some happiness and connection to this time of year, nothing too deep is needed to stop and smell the flowers, smell them, touch them and see them, even if it’s winter underneath, they stir and come out to us, and sing their songs. To quote the last lines of the poem The Windhover by Hopkins:

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion

Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,

Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

– Conrad Frankel