Seán McSweeney: Painter on the Shore

Seán McSweeney and author (Photo: Paddy Benson)

A slightly edited version of this article appeared in the Sunday Times Culture magazine on the 7th  July.

Seán McSweeney hasn't fetched up badly for a lad born in a teeming tenement off Dorset Street. Since 1984 he has lived in the heart of Yeats country: a few miles West of Drumcliffe, near Lissadell.  In the background looms Ben Bulben while further to the south you can see the crested and mysterious Knocknarea.  The Atlantic is down the road.  It's a long way from the Georgian House in  Synnott Place where McSweeney grew up.  And yet it's also a return to his roots.   It's where his mother came from.  She once attended the National School in Ballyconnell that is now his studio.

McSweeney is approaching 80 but his enthusiasm for painting has not diminished.  He had a successful show last October in Taylor Galleries, bucking the general trend by selling 12 pieces, and is already planning a show to coincide with his 80th birthday in 2015.   "I still have a great appetite to make work" he told me on a recent visit to his studio.  "I love the shoreline and want my next exhibition to be based on sea fields and shorelines".  The only concession he'll allow relates to the size of his paintings.  He feels he has not got the strength or stamina to manipulate the larger works these days.

Don't be deceived by the mild and amiable exterior, and the low-key way he wears the mantle of artist.  McSweeney is a passionately engaged painter.  He is also the living embodiment of a tradition of Irish landscape painting that goes back to Jack Yeats and Paul Henry and was continued by Patrick Collins and Dan O'Neill.  McSweeney is unique in the intensity of his vision.  He sees the world, not in a grain of sand, but in the bog land and sea shore close to his studio in County Sligo.  He shows us, in the words of the American poet Tess Gallagher, "Not the cliche of the Celtic mists, but the sour, unpredictable, fecund brew the earth itself can be." He is the chronicler of its seasonal variations:  the frozen winter, the electric green shoots of spring, the festival of summer and the autumn riches. Those vivid splashes of colour in his paintings could be the iris, the orchid, or the ragged robin making their seasonal appearances.

McSweeney's father Patrick was twice a painter: a master painter by trade and a fine amateur artist.  He took night classes at the Metropolitan School of Art and studied under Sean Keating and Maurice McGonigal.  The artist speaks fondly of a painting of Ben Bulben that his father had painted while on holiday with his wife's family.  When McSweeney was five his father was electrocuted in an industrial accident at the ESB.  Compensation was minimal in those austere days:  his mother got £600 and the children had £100 each put into trust.   So the family of six struggled.  His mother found occasional work at the Irish Hospital's Sweepstake, alongside Patrick Collins' mother.   Her family in Sligo provided some respite in the summer months when the children were shipped off to run wild and free around Ballyconnell.  His affection for this part of Ireland is rooted in those childhood summers.

Kindled by his father's example, McSweeney's interest in art was fired at the Hugh Lane Gallery around the corner from his home.  The calm and beauty of this island of art providing a retreat from the hurly burly of life in a tenement shared with seven other families.  McSweeney recalls being particularly struck by Constable - "there was a whole wall of them".  While the imperative to earn a living overruled further education, McSweeney attended night classes at NCAD following his daily round and so began his tentative journey towards being an artist.  He has a strong belief in working at rote jobs that do not sap the creative energy required for art.  He subscribes to Schopenhauer's dictum: "do not degrade your muse to a whore".  Teaching or graphic design were eschewed, instead he found undemanding work as a disbursements clerk with Palgrave Murphy.

In his early career he worked in isolation from other artists.  He is a quiet thoughtful man, shy even.  He lacked the peer group that full time attendance at NCAD would have provided.  Nevertheless he had discovered his vocation and held his first solo show in 1958 at the now defunct  Cavendish Gallery opposite the Gate Theatre.  A seminal moment in his career was the acceptance of a painting at the annual Irish Exhibition of Living Art in 1962.  This was a shop window for contemporary artists and the place where you might be spotted by one of the commercial galleries.  His work was noticed by Cecil King who recommended him to Leo Smith, proprietor of the prestigious Dawson Gallery.  His career was in progress.  Apart from the kudos of being with Ireland's leading commercial gallery, it also provided McSweeney with a peer group - the stable of artists associated with the gallery.   Most of his friends had been childhood companions whose only interest in art was the free drink associated with openings.  The waspish Smith disapproved of freeloaders and at one opening reminded McSweeney that "this is my party not yours".  An early lesson in art politics.  McSweeney recalls seeing Jack Yeats at one of the Dawson's openings but was too shy to approach the great man.  A shame as their artistic connection is palpable.

Like many artists of his generation (before Aosdana and the grants industry) McSweeney did not have it easy in the early days.  After marrying Sheila Murphy (who had to relinquish her good job at the ESB) they moved to Hollywood in County Wicklow in 1967.  There they raised a family and got by without tap water or electricity: the trips to the well and the lighting of the Tilley lamps were daily rituals.  But his reputation began to grow and following a sell out show at the Dawson Gallery he gave up the clerical work to paint full time.  In later years, when sales sagged, he found domestic painting and decorating a relaxing way to earn a living without any psychic cost.  They moved to Sligo in 1984.

McSweeney has often given the impression that his images emerge as he works the paint around, seeking the visual mot juste.  So it came as a surprise to find he uses sketch pads extensively.  He always carries one with him as he wanders his watery domain.  These notebooks contain both sketches and notes relating to colour and to the flora and fauna of his local habitat.  He notes the changing of the guard as the different flowers make their entrances and exits.  He sees these sketch pads as a spring board into a painting.  They allow him to get back out what he took in on his saunters by the sea or the bog.

McSweeney is in the tradition of romantic landscape painters.  He mentions Paul Henry as an influence but it's difficult to connect the airy idealised  world of Henry with the teeming bogscapes of McSweeney.  He shares Teskey's absorbtion with landscape and the sea but he does not follow Teskey's practice of constantly seeking out fresh locales - preferring to continue mining the bog and shoreline outside his studio for images - letting the seasons differences provide him with inspiration.  The closest to him in essence is I believe Patrick Collins, also self-taught, and from Sligo.  While they shared a tendency to use framing rectangles, the American poet Tess Gallagher saw a difference between them also.  Collins would "purposefully blur access to his scenes, as if the world had thrown away its glasses"  McSweeney on the other hand "occupies the moment after Collins, when the world is fully present, yet still inexplicable, mysterious in a clear-eyed way."  Perhaps the closest to him in his feeling for landscape is the Cork artist Maurice Desmond.  They share that pantheistic feel for nature.  It's not picture postcard beauty.  It's teeming, living, dark, and mysterious.

McSweeney seems drawn to literary folk, and they to him.  Dermot Healy is a near neighbour and they meet regularly.  He spoke affectionately of the late Michael Hartnett: "he was afraid to give up the drink in case he lost his talent".  The American poet Tess Gallagher is an admirer and has visited him in his studio regularly.  He has even attracted the attention of that most magisterial of critics Helen Vendler.  Her admiration for his work extended to a poetic and perceptive catalogue essay for a London show in 2003.  She saw in him something beyond the local:  "the seasonal pulsations of the paintings are universal".

McSweeney is passionate about his locale and intense in his desire to record its beauty.  He reflects on the many generations that passed though the classroom where he now works.  There are echoes there of young feet on floorboards and sportive voices. McSweeney recalls one lad who was "master of the shore" - knowing the spots where the lobster lurked and the time to catch them.  Like many others in the area he left to work in the factories of North Acton - his revels ending far from his native shore in the hard-drinking bars of Harlesden.  As I was leaving, we stood outside his studio looking north to Ben Bulben.  I asked was he ever tempted to emulate his father and paint it.   "I'll tackle it some day." he replied, not very convincingly.  Meanwhile he has plans for the shoreline nearby.

Sean Keating: The King Canute of Irish Art

The Tipperary Hurler by Sean Keating

An edited version of this review of Sean Keating Art, Politics, and Building the Irish Nation by Eimear O'Connor appeared in the Sunday Times Culture magazine on 12 May 2013.

Sean Keating is the King Canute of Irish art, the man who tried in vain to stem the tide of modernism.  His own art has not always aged well.  His paintings do not speak to the modern viewer like the mature works of his near contemporary Jack Yeats - whose work he described as "foolish stuff".  Brian Fallon refers to a "certain formal woodenness" in Keating and "a limited colour sense".  There is however plenty to relish in his best work.  The series of powerful and evocative paintings he did at Ardnacrusha and Poulaphuca have aged far better than his romanticised Aran peasants.  His portraits vary wildly in quality.  The one of W. T. Cosgrave with a curious top knot is particularly insipid and there's a very weak late portrait of a fey looking Michael O'Leary, lost in a sheepskin jacket.  But then there's a dashing early portrait of the IRA man Sean Moylan, and the heroic Tipperary Hurler, modelled on another IRA man Ben O'Hickey.  The book has over 200 excellent illustrations that allow you to review his highly-productive career and make up your own mind.

Listening to some old Radio Eireann broadcasts recently I was struck by how articulate Keating was, his fluent albeit dogmatic contributions occasionally punctuated with French terms (he was a fluent speaker).  It was only when he began to ride his hobby-horse about modern artists and their "outrageous vices" that you get a flavour of the zealot beneath the surface.  He deplored those who failed to follow, as he did, the "apostolic tradition".  He learned from Orpen, who learned from Henry Tonks in the Slade, who learned from a French master who was part of a tradition going back to David.  He saw the advent of modernism as breaking this chain of tradition and spent his life railing against it.  He also had a healthy contempt for preciousness about art, considering it merely a skilled trade.

O'Connor fights a rear-guard action on Keating's behalf, suggesting that his antipathy to modernism was overstated.  An anecdote related by John Turpin in an Irish Arts Review article on Keating suggests otherwise.  He recounts how Keating rebuked one of his students for reading a book on Cezanne, warning him that "you're either with us or against us".  O'Connor doesn't hide the case for the prosecution.  Two of the most egregious examples she gives were his description of Henry Moore's Reclining Figure as an "absolute effrontery to good taste", and his condemnation of Georges Rouault's Christ and the Soldier as "naive, childish and unintelligible".  In both cases his opposition to the acquisition of these modernist pieces by the Municipal Gallery of Art was overcome.  The Rouault affair caused a life-long rift with Louis le Brocquy who said that Keating should have "no rest until he cleared the painting of the insult he has helped to place upon it".

Keating loved a good feud and there's entertaining material about sniping between him and Flann O'Brien and the equally contentious Sean O'Faolain.  We also get a detailed analysis of Keating's role at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art (later the National College of Art) - a relationship which was to last for nearly 50 years.  Keating was never granted permanent status there and had to struggle on occasions to keep his job.  A French team inspecting the school for the Department of Education produced a scathing report on his behaviour:  "Enthusiastic on his own side but sceptical and unjust where others are concerned, he demoralises his pupils and brings despondency to his class."  He made no attempt to teach the generality of students, focusing instead on the few who showed some talent.  O'Connor writes in detail about the animosity between George Atkinson, principal at the DMSA, and Keating.  She claims no "outward acrimony" existed after 1937.  We learn in the Notes section that Atkinson committed suicide in 1941, with no further details.  In fact he gassed himself in his office in the school.  Maurice MacGonigal, who discovered the body, maintained that Atkinson's life-long depression was activated by Keating's accusation of some financial impropriety involving the annual Art Ball. This feud deserves a monograph of its own.

Eimear O'Connor's book is far from being a definitive biography, although we do get some fresh detail on Keating's origins in Limerick.  It's a beautifully illustrated piece of research that focuses on the public persona of Keating and his chronicling of the emerging State.  She also shines a light on his roles in those entwined institutions the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) and the National College of Art (NCA).  O'Connor herself makes no grand claims for her work.  In her introduction she describes the book as a "monograph".  The suggestion of academia and primary research implied by this term disarms any expectations of a warts and all picture of the man.  For no such picture emerges - he remains opaque.  His wife May is even more vaguely delineated.  It is stated that she was an active socialist and a proto-feminist but again the person remains hidden.    O'Connor recognises this problem in her introduction: "Keating was very private".  At the book launch Keating's grandson spoke of the artist's daily ritual of writing up his diaries - spending as much as a hour a day on them.  They apparently contained his opinions on people and the affairs of the day - no tortured inner life.   He spoke  of the warm domestic milieu Keating enjoyed.  There's a lovely photograph in the book of the artist with his arm around his two sons, Justin and Michael.  Maybe there are no dirty secrets.  He worked hard all day and went home to his family in the evening. The rest is silence.



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Portraits of the Artists 4: Basil Blackshaw

Basil Blackshaw - January 2013 (Paddy Benson)

This is my profile of Basil Blackshaw first published in the Sunday Times Culture magazine on the 27th January 2013:


Home is the Hunter

In rural Antrim, a few miles east of Lough Neagh, Basil Blackshaw is resting on his laurels.  His work may have slowed down to a trickle, but the esteem in which he is held continues to grow.  His reputation is set to be further enhanced by the exhibition Blackshaw at 80, currently running at the RHA.  This show features a representative selection of paintings from across his career chosen by the artist himself and Dr. Riann Coulter, curator of the F. E. McWilliam gallery in Banbridge.  In March it will move on to the Gordon Gallery in Derry as part of the UK City of Culture programme.

Blackshaw lives with his personable partner Helen Faloon in a warm and well-maintained old farmhouse off a side road near Antrim town.  His once thriving community of dogs is reduced to one, an elderly and affectionate Staffordshire Bull Terrier called Jet.  He enjoys a leisurely pipe after indulging his sweet tooth with a slice of rich coffee cake as he mulls over his memories.  He is reserved but friendly, smiling a lot and frequently bursting into laughter when recounting some amusing anecdote from his past.  Memories of the late Tom Caldwell and Markey Robinson were a particular source of humour for him. With some prompting from Helen he told a scabrous story about Markey that illustrated that artist's infamous capacity for foul language.  His response to any probing questions about his art is equivocal and often downright contradictory. In an interview with Brian McAvera in 2002 he maintained that Franz Marc had an influence on his horse paintings.  And you can surely see a connection in their use of colour.  However Marc's work seems much more controlled and not at all like Blackshaw's looser more painterly style.  When I brought it up he laughed and said there was no connection whatsoever.  Take your pick.

He is coy about influences generally but a tour of the current show will give a flavour of these.  There's his tribute to Cezanne in Cezanne's Gardener, his window paintings nod towards Rothko, his strings of horses at exercise suggest Degas, and you often see hints of Charlie Brady, especially in Studio.  Blackshaw is a master draughtsman and most of his work, especially his horse and dog paintings, are realistic depictions of these creatures.  One piece, Big Brown Dog, certainly isn't.  It's more heraldic than realistic, as Brian Fallon noted in his excellent 2012 essay.  He wasn't forthcoming when I queried this anomaly.  He's not keen on interpretation, preferring to emphasise the primary visual encounter.  One particular work, Anna on a Sofa, begs for analysis.  It features his erstwhile wife, Anna Ritchie sitting, arms folded tightly, jammed up to one side of an otherwise empty striped sofa. Again Blackshaw doesn't rise to bait - just smiling gnomically when I brought it up.  Their marriage break up was a difficult time for him.

Blackshaw may seem an amiable and easy-going character but he gets much exercised by the public airing of any work he deems inferior and he took a keen interest in the selection  for the show.  He also expressed himself as displeased that a substantial biography published a few years back by Eamonn Mallie contained pictures of work with which he had become dissatisfied.  His partner Helen chided him good-naturedly saying that it was his own fault as he was asked for his input but only took an interest when it was too late.

He's much more forthcoming on the subjects of dogs and horses.  He regrets not having more dogs these days but as he walks with the aid of a stick he cannot exercise them as before.  He trained greyhounds for about 12 years and had much success not just at local tracks but in  big races at Shelbourne Park and Harolds Cross.  He was unlucky not to win the Oaks on one occasion and spoke fondly of those days:  "Dateline was the best dog we ever had" he recalled, "she won bitch of the year that year".   Before he began to sell his art, dogs were his main source of income.  Unlike his fellow artists Bacon and Freud, Blackshaw didn't gamble.  He is too much the shrewd country boy for that foolishness I suspect.  His real affection for these creatures can be seen in the delightful A Dog and Two Men (see illustration).  Here two men chat while the dog sits close to one (Blackshaw himself) and gazes up at him adoringly.


Blackshaw's life has not just been a rural idyll surrounded by God's creatures.  It has been described by Brian Fallon as "an epic of survival".  He has fought and survived alcoholism, a painful separation, and a major studio fire (in 1985). The fire destroyed a large number of paintings and drawings (including a cherished horse painting by his father) and knocked the stuffing out of him for a period.  He particularly regretted the loss of four easels.  The fire did give him the opportunity to build a new studio without a view.  The absence of windows in this new studio, all light coming from skylights, meant he didn't get distracted by the scenery around him as before.  A further stimulus to get on with it came in the form of the model Jude Stephens. She was his muse for a whole series of nude studies which took him away from his landscapes and animals.  Her essay in Basil Blackshaw - Painter by Brian Ferran (published in 1995) is a charming evocation of an unworldly man.

Many artists move to the country and pursue their careers from idyllic locales,
with romantic views of the Atlantic perhaps, or amid the rugged grandeur of West Cork. There they live within their creative bubbles - occasionally emerging to astonish the city with their visions. Blackshaw is different - he is of the countryside as well as being in it. His horses, dogs and fighting cocks are not mere objects selected for our visual delectation.  They are the creatures of his daily round. The colourful fighting cocks were an enthusiasm for many years.  He trained them for their bloody battle and still speaks proudly of his success in this arena.  His landscapes are inspired by Dromora and the areas around his home where he enjoyed hunting and point-to-points.  In his time he has been better known to many of his neighbours as a trainer of dogs or a breeder of horses than as an artist. The practical horny-handed farmers of South Antrim would have little time in any case for a pursuit they would have deemed effete and worse, unprofitable.  Jude Stevens' essay tells a wonderful story of a trip to the "meat man" for dog food with Blackshaw. The trip culminated in a shack behind a ramshackle cottage which was was straight out  the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  The floor was carpeted with congealed blood, swarms of blue bottles buzzed around her head, and in the gloom she could see carcasses of dead cattle in varying stages of dismemberment.  Blackshaw was quite at home there, chatting to the bloodied butcher, and they departed with a package of "warm meat".


Considering what a horsey country we are it's amazing that so few artists seem drawn to the subject.  True there are a few specialists, such as Peter Curling, but in terms of major figures it's hard to think of anyone other than Jack Yeats. He shares with Blackshaw a feel for the world of racing particularly.  In the current show we get horses in a variety of guises: coming a cropper in a steeplechase, exercising in strings, surreal in purple or red, or, as in Night Rider, conveying an sinister cowboy.  One giant piece,The Fall, is a virtuoso performance.  This charcoal and oil work shows a crashing fall, the horse  landing on its head as the jockey flies through the air, hands braced for impact.  The energy of the calamitous moment perfectly preserved.  You also marvel at the use of charcoal in a picture of such scale.

You can't help but feel that Blackshaw prefers animals to people.  He has famously declared that "portrait painting is a nuisance".  Looking at his portrait of Arthur Gibney in the show you can see dead hand of a commission rather than heartfelt engagement.  Many of his portraits however are alive and engaging. Two that stood out were a thoughtful Brian Friel and a warm and vivacious Mary McGrath.


Blackshaw was a precocious talent.  He was doing commissions in his teens and was accepted for art college at the age of 16.  There he enjoyed the benign influence of the wonderfully named Romeo Toogood.  He thrived there and his career took off when he had a piece acquired by the Ulster Museum when he was 20.  He was also taken up early by Tom Caldwell, an astute judge of talent and an energetic dealer.



The sturm and drang of his boozing days with the likes of Dan O'Neill and Paddy Collins are but fond memories.  Helen tells stories of rescuing Blackshaw and O'Neill from Belfast during the troubles and running the gauntlet of army road blocks with the two drunken and garrulous artists.  He has long foresworn the drink.  Himself and Helen are plainly happy and at peace in their comfortable rural retreat.  Their walls are bedecked with an eclectic collection of paintings:  amidst his own pieces are works by friends past and present, such as Charlie Brady and Neil Shawcross.  There's also a  wonderful drawing of a boar by Elizabeth Frink.  One suspects Blackshaw will do little more painting. When I enquired about looking at his studio Helen said the heating was broken and that it was a bit dismal. A cursory look confirmed this.  He has no immediate plans to set foot in it.  Maybe spring will bring some inspiration, or his old friend Jude will call around and stir him into action.   But a man who has painted for nearly 70 years is surely entitled to take life easy.  His legacy is safe.

Portraits of the Artists 3: John Shinnors

This is my profile of John Shinnors first published in the Sunday Times Culture Magazine on 7 October 2012.

John Shinnors 

In October 2003 the University of Limerick unveiled Sean Scully’s monumental Wall of Light at the entrance to the university.  Senior academics from the university, local government officials, and members of the upper echelons of the Irish art scene graced the splendid occasion.  The great man himself was there, closely attended by Barbara Dawson from the Hugh Lane Gallery.  After the various speeches, certain notable guests proceeded to a grand dinner in Plassey House, the president’s domain – a handsome art-bedecked building on campus.  As Limerick’s leading artist, John Shinnors was of course invited to join this select group.  But he was having none of it.  It was time for his nightly trip to the Spotted Dog – his local in Roxborough.  While Shinnors doesn’t bite the hand that feeds him, neither does he bother to give it the occasional lick of affection.  

John Shinnors is arguably one of Ireland’s most successful artists.  All the indicators are in place:  Aosdana, the RHA annual show, the Gandon profile with laudatory essays by Brian Fallon and Aidan Dunne, the IMMA permanent collection, the Crawford collection in Cork, many important private collections, and a substantial RTE documentary: Michael Garvey’s Split Image – John Shinnors in 1997.  He has had a series of sold-out shows in Taylor Galleries over the years, oneof which involved a well-documented squabble between patrons jockeying for precedence as the truck carrying the work arrived from Limerick.  Even more significantly his work sells well at auction, unlike many of his contemporaries.  Yet Shinnors remains a maverick on the Irish art scene, someone who doesn’t quite belong. This may be partly to do with the resolutely unclubbable nature of the man – it’s difficulty to imagine him enjoying a bibulous dinner at the RHA for example.  Or maybe it’s something to do with his refusal to take his role as an artist too seriously.  He sees it as a job rather than a vocation and doesn’t engage in too much navel-gazing about the meaning of his work.  Although, ironically, the work itself with its provocative and ambiguous motifs is ripe for speculative analysis.

Shinnors is a popular and respected figure in his native city.  He frequently features in the Limerick Leader and is an active participant in the life of the city – as evidenced in a recent spat with local councillor Tom Shortt.  Comedian Pat Shortt’sbrother was not amused by Shinnors description of some public art as “moronic”.  You will find his work at the university, in the Hunt Museum and of course in the drawing rooms of the Ennis Road. Tony Ryan of GPA and Dessie O’Malley were early supporters.  A visit to the National Self-Portrait Collection in the University of Limerick provides an opportunity to see his magnificent, moodily lit, self-portrait.  The template surely for his scarecrows’ noses.  And it’s not all one-way traffic in Limerick.  He sponsors an annual art scholarship, the ShinnorsCuratorial Scholarship, at the Limerick College of Art.  He is also a well-known figure on the streets.  On a recent trip to the Limerick City Centre Post Office to enquire about the whereabouts of his historical paintings (Sarsfield and other heroic local figures) that used to hang there, I met two customers who claimed to know him well and offered suggestions as to the whereabouts of the missing paintings.

The art itself reinforces his outsider status.  It defiescategorization.  He’s certainly not an abstract painter in the Tyrrell mould, nor is he part of our standing army of landscape artists.  He has no truck with the neat “isms” used by critics.  “I’m a Shinnorist” he jokes.  You can look at his early surreal work and see the influence of Jack Donovan, or trace the lineage of his chiaroscuro to Georges de la Tour and Caravaggio, as some critics have done.  But his mature style is truly unique.  Figurative elements emerge slowly from what seem initially to be abstract compositions mainly in black and white.  (Shinnorshas famously claimed to use five different blacks.)  He’ll cheerfully talk you through the hidden elements in each piece but it’s more fun to see what you can uncover on your own.  It takes multiple viewings to fully decipher a piece.  Over the years certain tropes recur.  The ominous magpies and the free-wheeling swallows, the disturbing scarecrows, the looming lighthouses, and the looping kites.  And always the stripes: badgers and cats, railings and washing lines.  The best of his work has a dark expressive quality – haunted and mysterious.  What the critic Brian Fallon referred to as “spookiness”.  This is particularly true of his scarecrow heads with their gaping sockets. The series of these heads he completed in 2002 are one of the highlight of his career, and one of the most impressive achievements in contemporary art in this country.  Unfortunately they have disappeared into a corporate collection and have barely been viewed by the general public.  Occasionally there is a purely decorative piece, such as Cat’s Home (1999) or some of his Friesian paintings, but these are exceptions.  He’s no formulaic artist rehashing a bunch of worn-out motifs.  He is constantly breaking out in new directions, finding fresh inspiration around him.  His regular visits to DunAengus inspired a series of large paintings that captured the striking beauty of that magical place from a unique birds-eye perspective.  This was a literal work (no shadowy ambiguity),simple and powerful.

When asked about influences he paraphrases Monet: “what I see around me is my guide”.  He is inspired by those sudden visual encounters that can happen anytime and will be the catalyst for aseries of paintings.  Shinnors is keen to assert that his recurring motifs are grounded in real-life incidents – as if he is eager to dispel any fanciful interpretations of his work.  The scarecrow was first spotted in a neighbour’s haggart, the kite on a holiday in Kilkee, and the lighthouse on a day trip to Loop Head.  He encountered the migrating swallows trapped in an old keep where they were rescued, he tells us, by our brave artist and his Harris hat.  His stimulus could be a herd of Friesians, a line of black-clad waitresses, or a magpie circling St. John’s Cathedral.  Or it could be (as in his current show) a circus tent glimpsed through railings on the Roxborough Road.  

Shinnors spent 18 months at the Limerick College of Art under the loose tutelage of Jack Donovan.  He left prematurely for London – for freedom and for financial reasons.  After the London hiatus and a variety of casual jobs he returned to Limerick and began to paint.  Initially he was strongly influenced by Donovan’s style.  “That’s the way I wanted to paint”.  He submitted works to the network of small commercial galleries that proliferated in those days – Goodwin’s Gallery was a particular favourite.  These solo forays were reasonably successful and he made a modest living supplemented by some teaching hours at the alma mater he had deserted.  His big break came in 1984 when he won the GPA Emerging Artist award.  The awards ceremony was attended by John Taylor of Taylor Galleries and he was impressed enough to offer him his first Dublin show in 1987.  

His current show in Taylor Galleries (until the 27 October) is his first one-man show since 2007.  It consists of a mere seven paintings, although one of these is the enormous Hoarding and Small Circus, weighing in at a massive 69 x 114 inches.  The other six are all oils on linen measuring 11 x 11.5 inches.  The small pieces frequently focus on nocturnal encounters along of the Roxborough Road, railings and hoardings, a splash of white from a circus tent, a shadowy cat slowly emerging from darkness, tail erect.  Shinnors had been reading Jean Renoir’s biography of his father last year and he saw parallels between the influence of the Provencal sunlight on the impressionists and the influence of the artificial light on his own painting.  Hence the subtitle of the show:  Electrical Impressionism.  There are pools of various coloured lights emerging from the darkness:startling red traffic lights, orange sodium lighting, and a variety of lights from the old railway works.  The show captures his impressions of the world revealed by these lights. Surprisingly,he mentions Whistler’s work as a possible parallel.  Knowing this you see the connection immediately in a piece like Nocturne San-Giorgio and even more so in Nocturne in Gray und Gold -Chelsea Snow.  Although Shinnors’ paintings, especially Art Van Leaving (see image), are more confrontational and dramatic than Whistler’ muted work.

Having failed to track down the Shinnors paintings that used to hang in the Limerick Post Office, I eventually met up with the man himself in his studio on O’Connell Street.  I asked him what happened to the missing paintings.  He claimed that he had destroyed them and taken the stretchers for reuse.  When he was starting off as an artist he was suffering from public indifferenceand eager to get himself noticed.  He had a family to feed.  He spoke to his patron Dessie O’Malley who arranged to get hiswork into that prime location.  When I bemoaned theirdestruction, he smiled at me, “They had served their purpose”.