The Collectors’ Salon - An evening of Art and Conversation with Irish, British and European collectable contemporary artists.

The event will showcase new works by Liam O’Neill, Alicja Urbaniak, Harry Durdin Robertson, Sandra Bell and Aidan Bradley.

We will also be taking this opportunity to welcome the painters Anthony Murphy, Victor Richardson and Stephen Forbes along with the sculptors Mark Rode and Helen Sinclair A.R.B.S. to the gallery salon.

Liam O'Neill

Liam O'Neill was born in Corcha Dhuibhne, West Kerry, Ireland, in 1954 and is among Ireland`s most talented contemporary artists. He is a self taught painter who, over the last twenty years, has shown work at the Royal Hibernian Academy, Oireachtas, National Portrait Exhibition and Claremorris Open. His paintings are collected nationally and internationally.

His obsession with the west coast has been his main source of motivation and inspiration over the years. His paintings recapture images of harbours, horse fairs, landscapes, fishermen, bog and meadow scenes. The animated strokes of bright colour, which are spontaneously applied in a loose expressionistic manner using a palette knife, emphasise the passionate freedom of the artist's style. Liam's inspiration also comes from the colour and spectacle of race meetings, The Curragh, Cheltenham, Aintree, and local Flapper Races such as Dingle and Béal Bán Beach. Further inspiration comes from life in the Arts and Public Life, with portraits of John Wayne,Richard Harris, former Taoiseach Charles J. Haughey and the great Irish writers such as Samuel Beckett.

Alicja Urbaniak

"I like painting
I like the unknown accompanying the creation of every new painting, when walking out of the studio, I look at the canvas and I do not know if it will remain unchanged for many years or perhaps only till the next day. Every single painting comes as a surprise, sometimes happens to be a disappointment, though I must admit I like my unsuccessful paintings. Set aside in the corner, they seem to look at me with reproach and wait there till I pluck up enough courage to change the colour or composition. Sometimes I turn a canvas upside down and paint it out till there appears such a beautiful fragment that it is worth painting the rest. Then I do my most beautiful paintings." - Alicja Urbaniak

Harry Durdin Robertson

Harry Durdin Robertson was born 1985 in Wexford, Ireland to parents who were both artists and into an environment which was always strongly interested and active in the Arts.

Currently the artist works in a shared studio in Piazzale Donatello, Florence and also frequently returns to Ireland where he works on commissions.

Artists who influenced his work are Edward Hopper, John Singer Sargent, Ilya Repin, Isaak Levitan and Velasquez.

The artist's work is included in several private collections worldwide and he is represented by the Oriel Gallery in Dublin.

Sandra Bell

Sandra Bell was born in 1954. She was educated in Newry, Dundalk and at Glengara Park, Co. Dublin. She is a self-taught sculptor using the "Lost Wax Method" for bronze casting.

Sandra finds great pleasure in the moulding and developing of a remarkable variety of simple linear patterns and flowing shapes. These figurative images are executed with high technical skill and craftmanship, superbly finished with rich and varied patinations and polished surfaces. They invite active participation.

Sinuous, sensuous, elegant, graceful, tactile, feminine - these descriptive terms all apply to her work. There are many different influences in Sandra's sculpture - Celtic, Classical, African and yet all her pieces have a uniqueness that is her own style. Her work is based on the human form, abstracting it to eliminate detail so that only the essential essence of the figure remains. Sandra portrays not the flesh, but the spirit and grace of humanity in bronze.

Aidan Bradley

Aidan Bradley was born in 1961 and lives in Dublin. This fine landscape and architectural painter works mainly in oils but also has interest in the area of printmaking. He draws his inspiration from the historical features of Dublin, be it a Georgian streetscape, capturing the variety and richness of the door surrounds, the classical colonnade of a Church, a red bricked Edwardian Terrace or the contrasting raw landscape of rural Ireland, particularly Achill Island and the Cork coastline with shoreline cottages. He has a competency with oil paint, the ability to handle it in a fluid impasto palette, in his distinctive loose painterly style, with a pleasing lightness of touch, creating his response to this formal structure and its elements. His keen eye picks out and portrays an interesting angle of the scene before him; solid forms emerge from deep shadow and light, using a subtle change of tone. His passage of light to shade is different in every painting, each colour unfolding its scale of values in gradual stages, some structures just hinted at, be it railings, gable ends, steps, a lofty spire or a windswept distant dwelling.

Anthony Murphy

"In the early sixties my father would travel with his family to visit his brother, my uncle, the poet Richard Murphy, living in the old forge in Cleggan outside Clifden. To supplement his meagre income my uncle would sail tourists to Inishbofin in his Galway hooker called The True Light. On the way over you could watch the mackerel dying slowly in the bilges and follow the porpoises. Sometimes we would stop off at High Island where monks had eked out their existence over a thousand years ago. No harbour, just a leap ashore at the foot of a cliff. But the pagan world was present too for Mrs Coyne was definitely a witch. A witch that knitted my geansaí of emerald green that caught every flying fishhook. To my eye then Fodhla (ancient Ireland) was everywhere and the sweet smell off a donkey’s breath a revelation. Today I see how well named was my Uncle’s boat. If a painting of mine holds true light – then I am still aboard, a little seasick, but at least I am not a mackerel." - Anthony Murphy, March 2012

Victor Richardson

Victor Richardson was born in Belfast in 1952. He moved to County Cork in 1974 where he has lived for most of the last 30 years except for a few years in England and France. He has worked as a professional painter since 1980, exhibiting widely in Ireland , Britain and the U.S.A. Obvious influences in his paintings were the works of Seurat, Bonnard and Klimt, but over time he has adapted elements of Impressionism and Pointillism to develop his own distinctive style which manifests a fresh and vivid approach to traditional imagery.

For most of his career Richardson has worked in soft pastel. Pastel is often confused with chalk, but whereas the latter is merely limestone and dye, pastel is actually dry powdered pigment moulded into a crayon with binding solution. The word pastel is actually derived from the "paste" made by grinding the pigment and binder together. Pastel is as close as an artist can come to painting with pure colour and there is no cracking or discolouring with age, as is evident with many oil paintings.

In recent years he has returned to oil painting and now exhibits both pastels and oils in his current solo shows.

Stephen Forbes

Born in Dublin of an English father and French mother, Stanhope Forbes studied in London at the Lambeth School of Art and the R.A. Schools. He went to Paris in 1880 to study under Bonnat, a successful portraitist. Keen to paint en plein air, he headed for Brittany working out of St Malo. He returned to Paris in 1881 but felt that he had little more to learn from Bonnat, who disapproved of plein-air painting. In 1882 he moved to Quimperle, where he met up with other Irish painters; these included Osborne, Kavanagh, Hill and Garstin. In January 1884 he moved to Cornwall, settling at Newlyn, where he became one of the leading figures of the Newlyn School.

Mark Rode

Mark Rode is a sculptor based in Ireland specialising in bronze figurative sculpture. He has exhibited in galleries across Ireland, England and Australia and has created many major public sculptures. Working from his studio in County Mayo he is continually producing new work and is available for public, private and corporate commissions.

” I work in an expressive realist style and use vigorous modeling to imbue each sculpture with an energy of it`s own.”

Helen Sinclair

Helen Sinclair was born in South Wales in 1954. She studied sculpture at Wimbledon School of Art (1972- 1976). After teaching for twelve years, she has been a full-time sculptor since 1988. With her technician (traveller and writer Gary Ley) she does her own mould making and resin casting. All her bronze sculpture is cast at the MB Fine Arts Foundry in Pembrokeshire.

The human figure is her primary subject : the actual figure (in movement and at rest, clothed and unclothed) and the figure as depicted by other artists in any medium and at any phase in history.

Her influences include the sculptural forms and mythology of ancient civilisations (Etruscan, Egyptian, South American), Italian Renaissance sculpture (especially Donatello) and twentieth century sculptors : Emilio Greco, Medardo Rosso, Giacometti and, most notably, Willhelm Lehmbruck. She also looks to painting for inspiration, especially Picasso, Matisse, Chagall and Modigliani.