Artists Statement: I’m delighted to be sharing my paintings here at the Source in Thurles. It is a home coming for me, as I was born here in Thurles. My own source is nearby: in the parishes of Drom and Inch and Templemore, in the townlands of Barnane and Ballyheen, under the Devil’s Bit Mountain.

In a rare and recent interview with the painter Frank Auerbach, not long before he died last year at the age of 94, when asked how he thought of his work, looking back over his long painting life, he stated that it wasn’t up to him to judge, but that looking back on it now, with the benefit of hindsight, he was satisfied that he had been “working on his own frontier”. I am sympathetic to this poetic understanding of the endeavour to make paintings, working on the frontier of what one knows, and hopefully venturing further than that. I find it thrilling and evocative and liberating, this commitment to an unrelenting search for authenticity.

My exhibition at Rathfarnham Castle from April 13th to June 2nd last year was titled Frontier, acknowledging the Castle’s historic position as the first fortified house on the edge of the land held by the English in Elizabethan Ireland, and my sense of my position as a painter working on the borders of what I know. These concerns continued with Vocatus, my most recent exhibition of paintings at Hillsboro Fine Art in Dublin last August.

So, in preparing for this exhibition at the Source over the past months, I have had in mind a title that continues to hold the ideas of Frontier as central to my current preoccupations…so Lines of Engagement is the title of my exhibition in Thurles. It sets the stage for the intention out of which the paintings emerge…the elusiveness of finding the image and then holding it….I am reminded of my father and his description of catching trout with his bare hands when he was a boy…tickling fish, he called it. Now you have to be in a good relationship with the river for that to happen.

T. S. Eliot described it as: “each venture is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate”; similarly, Seamus Heaney articulates beautifully the process: “the crucial action is pre-verbal, to be able to allow the first alertness or come-hither, sensed in a blurred or incomplete way, to dilate and approach as a thought or as a phrase”. Philip Guston also spoke about attempts at the way in, remarking on how when one begins the act of painting, the studio is crowded with all our concerns which we bring with us. As we work, they begin to leave one by one, until eventually we are left alone. Then, if we are really lucky, we leave also. There is a ring of rightness to this understanding that I know to be true from personal experience.

It is with gratitude for the inspiration and example of these and other extraordinary artists that each time I begin, a new journey of discovery.

Eddie Kennedy was born in Thurles, North Tipperary in 1960 and now lives in Dublin.

First exhibiting at the Independent Artists Exhibition at the Douglas Hyde Gallery in 1982, he graduated from Limerick School of Art and Design with a Distinction in Painting in 1983. He was awarded a full scholarship by the University of Cincinnati, where he received a Master’s in Fine Art Painting in 1989. Subsequently, Kennedy spent a number of years in New York painting and working alongside established US artists. He has exhibited with, among others, the John Cacciola Gallery in Chelsea and at art fairs in Los Angeles, Miami and Chicago. Kennedy’s work has also been exhibited in the United Kingdom and Europe. Early solo shows in Ireland included the Tom Caldwell Gallery in Dublin and the Riverrun Gallery in Limerick. He returned home to Ireland with a solo show at Dublin’s Irish Life Exhibition Centre in 1996. Later Kennedy exhibited with the Paul Kane Gallery in Dublin and had solo shows at Éigse, Carlow (2000 and 2009) and was included in the Éigse, 30th anniversary exhibition (2010) at VISUAL, Carlow.

It is with his frequent exhibitions at Hillsboro Fine Art in Dublin that Kennedy’s paintings are best known. Kennedy has been represented by Hillsboro Fine Art, Dublin, since 2004. In 2017, Kennedy was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant and was elected as a member of Aosdána. He has been the grateful recipient of awards from the Ballinglen Arts Foundation and TippFM. Publications on his work include Find (2007, ISBN: 978-0-9556736-0-3), Thread (2012, ISBN: 978-0-9564950-9-9) and most recently, Points of Departure by Aidan Dunne, Irish Arts Review, Winter 2020, Volume 37(3), p.68-71.

www.hillsborofineart.ie
www.eddiekennedystudio.com