Eamon Colman

Oriel Fach

Paul Roche

 

 

Stairs

Photographs by Mike Taylor

 

Main Gallery

What is real or actual? Everything or nothing?

7 May to 5 June

 

As a painter. Eamon Colman is unmistakably a colourist. Not only because colour – often strong, bright
colour – is a major constituent in terms of the formal pictorial construction of his compositions, but also because he expects the qualities inherent in colour to do a substantial part of the emotional work he sees
as integral to the painting process.
Aidan Dunne – Arts Critic The Irish Times

This new body of paintings by Irish painter Eamon Colman is made in response to the writings of German philosopher Immanuel Kant, 1724–1804, who was a dominant and influential figure of the Enlightenment. One of his major works Critique of aesthetic judgment, discusses the four possible reflective judgments –
the agreement, the beautiful, the sublime and the good.
From his ongoing research, Colman has turned his philosophies to the subject of landscape, in particular the questions that surround the depictions of landscape: questions about mood. Does the mood of the artist affect how the landscape is addressed? Does the landscape have a mood?
In reflective judgments, the viewer of a landscape seeks to find unknown universals for the given particulars. But, at the same time, they submit to the actual, to what is already known. ‘It is the job of the artist to seek out the other truth,’ Colman believes. The truths he sees and creates lie in the symbols for human emotion that can be found in the landscape.
Kant’s agreement is a purely sensory judgment – the tree is beautiful, grass is green – but what if the artist’s mood determines something different: the tree is ugly…? Or what about the mood of the viewer? Their mood at a given time will affect the experience of the landscape depicted, in this case through the medium of paint.
For Colman, the introduction of colour as an indicator of mood allows the viewer to intrepret this for themselves. The beautiful and the sublime have an external and internal order. Both enable the viewer a self-possessing free will to respond to a painting in a non-determined way. ‘The artist’, Colman believes, ‘is not the end controller but part of the visual debate.’

 

To view a video about Eamon's work, please click here.

Biography
Eamon Colman was born in 1957 in Dublin. He is one of Ireland’s foremost abstract painters, an elected member of Aosdana. He has exhibited in Ireland and internationally with 30 solo exhibitions since 1980. His awards include a one-year travel award by The Calcutta Artists Union in 1989; he was the first Irish artist to win a Full Fellowship to The Vermont Studio Center 2002; he is a Fellow of The Ballinglen Arts Foundation and was awarded a CCAT Interreg Major Award to tour an extensive exhibition in Wales in 2005. He won first prize in painting in EV+A 1989 and first prize in painting Eigse 2001. His solo exhibitions include a mid-term retrospective at The RHA Gallagher Gallery 1997; Palais de Congres, Lorient 1998; Frederickshaven, Denmark 1999; The Oriel Queens Hall Gallery, Wales 2005. In 2008–9, he exhibited at The Cecille R Hunt Museum, Webster University St Louis, USA. His work is in all major collections at home and abroad, including The Irish Museum of Modern Art, The Arts Council of Ireland, Fyffes, American Express, Delta Airlines, Citibank …
To view more work: www.eamoncolman.com. He is represented by Hillsboro Fine Art, Dublin, Ireland: www.hillsborofineart.com.

A bee honey tipsy returns to the hive

A creature of chilly dawn, the soft moonrise

As you walk, remember the smell of the sea

Carving the light from the moon to dye the mountain stream

Stalk still wet, face pale as Inca gold

Green tree, cropped, Wales