Opening Reception Thursday 3 October, 6:30 – 8:30pm

Eugene Conway, one of Ireland’s most well-known and respected landscape artists presents his first solo show in over 3 years at Gormleys Fine Art. The highly anticipated ‘Exploring Rural Ireland’ explores the ever changing landscape of rural Ireland. Eugene’s detail and use of colour ensure his paintings are breathtaking in their realism, while their stillness, peace and honesty portray the true nature and beauty of rural Ireland.

Artist James Hanley RHA writes about Eugene Conway’s work:

Listening to John Bowman’s programme of recollections on the life and poetry of the late Seamus Heaney, the overriding feeling was that the great poet wrote with such deceptive simplicity, grace and ease about the things that he knew so well. Great art should have that accessibility to all. It should speak of things that we all know, and can relate to, but through a prism of a language that has been made beautiful, rich and evocative. Write about what you know, and the result will be real. Paint about what you know and the result will be real. Eugene Conway paints what he knows. As a man he is a real friend, an honest, decent person, loved and liked by all he meets. He is held in great affection by all of us who know him in our generation of painters, and artists who draw and paint each Thursday at the RHA life-drawing sessions.

Graduating in 1991 from NCAD, Eugene has had several solo shows over the past 20 odd years. He had been painting while growing up, before ever becoming a student, and also during his apprenticeship as a carpenter as a young man. It is that same honest craft that dovetailed into his painting, his strong hands as deft with the brush, pencil or charcoal as with the hammer, chisel or saw. A very serious motorbike accident shortly after leaving college threatened Eugene’s career as a painter, but thankfully he made a full recovery.

Eugene paints landscape. He paints what he sees around him daily, and has seen for much of his life, making characteristic and evocative images of Ireland in summer sun, autumnal light and winter snow. The mood may be sombre at times, bleak and lonely, or sunlit and carefree, but the landscape is un-peopled, adding to its power and timelessness. He paints not the majestic sweep alone, but details – the turn of a road, a tree-lined boreen, a twist in a river, a bridge, a barn, outbuildings, a copse, and puddles in the road. It is the local, the familiar, finding rich painterly pickings in all, and a beauty, to paraphrase Kavanagh, in the ordinary and the overlooked. He is also a natural colourist, getting tone and hue of tree bark, hedgerow, water and sky so perfectly.

Eugene is committed to his craft, his vision and his heartfelt, skilful recording of the Irish landscape around his native Kilkenny and beyond. We the viewers are the richer for his work, and as people for his friendship and camaraderie.