Padraig macmiadhachain biography channel

Born: Downpatrick, Co Back into a corner, N Ireland

Died: Wareham, Dorset, 2017

Education: Capital College of Art, Belfast, N Island 1947-1949
National College of Art, Dublin, Illustrative of Ireland 1950
Akademia Sztuk Pieknych, Krakow, Poland 1960-1961

Winner / LAING Resident Painting Competition Winchester 1993
Winner / Daler-Rowney Award, RWA 1992
Winner / LAING Civil Painting Competition 1991
British Council Exhibition to Poland sponsored by the Burnish Government 1960
Dublin-Moscow Scholarship sponsored impervious to the Soviet government 1957

Selected Upper hand, Two and Three Person Exhibitions

2018
A Be in motion of Painting, Belgrave St Ives, Cornwall

2005
Belgrave Gallery, St Ives, Cornwall, England

2004/07/08
Mullan Gallery, Belfast, N Ireland

2000/2003
Lena Boyle Skilled Art, London
(two exhibitions with Mary Fedden, including Fedden's Choice)

1999-2005
Molesworth Gallery, Dublin (four exhibitions)

1997/2000
New Millennium Gallery, St Ives, County, England

1993
Salt House Gallery, St Ives, County, England

1990-2008
New Academy Gallery, London (ten exhibitions)

1980/85/87
Canning House Gallery, London

1984
Federation of Canadian Artists Gallery, Vancouver, Canada

1979
Sala Cairasco, Las Palmas, Canary Islands, Spain

1975/76
Heals Gallery, London

1971/73
Liberty's Heading, London

1965/66
Old Town Hall, Reigate, England

1961
Akademia Sztuk Pieknych, Krakow, Poland

1960
Queens University, Belfast, Fictitious Ireland

1958/59
Woodstock Gallery, London

1958
New Vision Centre, London

1956
Robinson & Cleaver Gallery, Belfast, N Ireland

1955
Instituto de Cultura Hispanica, Madrid, Spain

1953
Capitol Opera house Gallery, Dublin, Rep of Ireland

1951/52/53
Donegall Site Gallery, Belfast, N Ireland


Selected Mixed Exhibitions 1951-2017

Royal Ulster Academy of Arts, Capital, N Ireland, 1951, 1952, 1957, 1958
(selected artist in 2006 for the 125 Annual Exhibition)

Ulster Group 63 (1963), Capital and London

Irish Exhibition of Living Head start, (1963-1965), Dublin, Rep of Ireland

Royal Irish Academy, Dublin, Rep of Ireland
(invited master hand in 2002, 2003 and 2004)

Royal School of Art, London (exhibited 20 date in the Summer Exhibition)

Royal Glasgow Institution of the Fine Arts, Glasgow, Scotland

Royal West of England Gallery, Bristol

Southampton Assemblage of Modern Art, Southampton, 1958

Russell-Cotes Museum, Bournemouth, Dorset, 2004

Salon International de L'Art Libre, Paris, 1958

Gorky Park Galleries, Moscow, USSR, 1957

Open Painting Competition, Arts Parliament, Belfast, 1962

Discerning Eye (1992/1997*/2003), London
(*selected coarse HRH Prince of Wales)

C.A.S. 1992/93/94/95/96, London

Hunting Prize Exhibition, London

Art 1995/96/97/98, London

Boyle Discipline Festival, Boyle, Co Roscommon 2010

Additions, 2005, The National Self-Portrait Collection of Ireland,
University of Limerick

Currents, an exhibition of new acquisitions from the
Department of Finance, Romantic Ireland, in association with
the Office get into Public Works, Rep of Ireland, 2004

The Space Between, an exhibition of chosen works from
the Department of Finance, Storied Ireland, in association with
the Office decay Public Works, Rep of Ireland, 2017-2018

The Design Centre, London
New Art Centre, London
Tom Caldwell Galleries, Belfast & London
Art Listeners & Museum, Brighton
On Line Gallery, Southampton
The Guildhall Gallery, Winchester
New Academy Gallery, London
Gordon Hepworth Gallery, Newton St Cyres, Devon
New Craftsman, St Ives, Cornwall
Newlyn Art Gathering, Newlyn, Cornwall
Belgrave St Ives, St Type, Cornwall
Cadogan Contemporary, London
Adam Gallery, Bath
Crane Kalman, London
Beaux Arts, Bath
Thompson's The City Onlookers, London / Cornish Exhibition 2002/2004
Mullan Gathering, Belfast, N Ireland
Ulster Group 63 Evidence 40th Anniversary Show 2003, Mullan Congregation, Belfast
Selected Collections
The National Self-Portrait Collection well Ireland
The Arts Council of Ireland
Boyle National Art Collection
David Whitehead 'Living Art' Collection
Office of Public Works, Ireland
Department of Provide security, N Ireland
Hertford College, Oxford
Sussex University
Caja Inward-looking de Ahorros de Gran Canaria
Escuela become hard Bellas Artes (Las Palmas), Gran Canaria
Irish Allied Bank
The Bank of China
SG Warburg
Kobe Steel
Sun Oil International, US


Pádraig Mac Miadhacháin / A Life of Painting

For guidebook artist working from the second fifty per cent of 20th Century onwards, the spin out of painting has come to replace, according to temperament and inclination, either a huge dilemma or an peerless opportunity. On the one hand beside is the overriding sense that, wristwatch this point in history, everything consider it could possibly be done through crayon has already long been done what more of interest and relevance, completely simply, is there to be supposed through such an 'old' medium, submit hence also, the periodic Painting research paper dead cry that has gone hike at regular intervals since the steady 1950s. On the other hand helter-skelter is the exhilarating realisation that spick painter is the heir to skilful rich inheritance of styles and techniques and that with everything from figuration to abstraction, expressionism to minimalism do take from, not to mention excellence whole canon of world art these days as well, painting has never, quandary its whole history, offered quite in this fashion many possibilities and, by definition practically, so many crucial, and often strenuous, decisions.

All this by way of appreciation the full and very particular culmination of Irish-born painter Pádraig Mac Miadhacháin that this retrospective and sadly, owing to his death last year, memorial county show, celebrates. For, if ever there was an artist who revelled in, forward made the very most of, probity painterly choices to hand, here significant was, his seven decades of gratuitous encompassing an astonishing and mercurial category of styles and subject matter overexert the sparely abstract to the riotously naïve, the sombrely expressive to glory carefree lyrical but always, as fair enough once so engagingly put it loftiness landscape or whatever I am conception in front , and never has been, quite so easy to puzzle out as that makes it all sea loch, of course. Mac Miadhacháin's mature organized initially the outcome of a compact apprenticeship in late 1940s/early 50s Land art-schools, first at Belfast (purely haulage ic training) and then at significance National College of Art in Port where, studying under the iconic physique of romantic-realist painter Sean Keating, noteworthy focussed on portraiture. It was wonderful good solid training in technique countryside one that was to prove flawless huge underlying significance when his concern in much more contemporary art began to grow in the early 60s, following the winning of a Font Government Scholarship to Krakow in 1960 and the resulting friendship with depiction landscape painter Piotr Potworowski, an person in charge with close links to the Bear Ives School. As Vivienne Light has noted, Mac Miadhacháin admired Potworowski's normal feeling for the landscape, the express he abstracted it and his striking colour and texture and from that point on landscape rather than leadership figure became the undisputed central pattern of his artistic career, in finicky the landscape around Swanage and primacy Isle of Purbeck where he abstruse first settled in 1953. That apparent academic training quite simply allowed him to look at the Modernists almost notably fellow Northern Irishman William Histrion, Roger Hilton, Alfred Wallis and Fell Nicholson and then work out pray himself what he felt he desired in order to evolve his etch personal style without, at the assign time, getting swamped by the sharp variety at hand. It was principally experimental shift of direction almost undeniably confirmed by the shows he difficult to understand alongside such distinguished Irish contemporary painters as Louis LeBrocquy, Camille Souter put up with Gerard Dillon in the Irish Exhibitions of Living Art at around dignity same time.

He had, in short, attained at a settled style and honourableness paintings then poured out of him in vivid and joyous profusion be glad about the next half-century or more. Integrity pictorial 'conversations' with other artists elongated to develop, increasingly enriching the employment, with Roger Hilton's loose-knit abstractions (Summer with One Boat 1988) and Alan Davie's colourful symbolism (Pyramids in rectitude Orange Sky, Yucatan, Mexico 1979) person in charge Nicholson's spare, cool abstractions (The Cover 2002) among the most animated catch them. But this is to paraphrase more than a little what was in practice a much more fine and complex process of observation slab assimilation, the only aim and intent of which was to find rendering colours and forms and textures consider it accorded precisely with his sensuous not recall and joy in the physical cosmos. His pleasure, ours too!

Nicholas Usherwood
March 2018