Jeremy Henderson

Jeremy John Christmas Henderson (25 December 1952 - 28 April 2009) was a Irish artist and painter. Artist in Residence at Kingston University, he exhibited at the Royal Academy and is included in National Art Collections.
"Jeremy Henderson, an Irish artist of Scottish decent, dedicated his life to the creation and realisation of his art and its meaning, reflecting life's panorama, be that of his home town of Lisbellaw and Ireland's troubles, or his unique journey through life, its loves and inspirations and the perspectives presented to him, destined to become a painter of influence.
"Jeremy and I had many conversations about his art and how he studied other painters, influences on his early years and locations which inspired his work".
-Sandra Tweedie, sister & fellow artist.
A painter of international respect, capable of expressing the deep and subtle nuance of meaning and sentiment of his art, layering paints to build a complex narrative across a medium open to the interpretation of the observer. Separate from many of his contemporaries, never courting the commercialisation of his work, Jeremy Henderson is probably Europe's most undiscovered artist and surely Ireland's invisible genius."(jeremyhendersonart.weebly.com)

 Henderson's painting style transitioned greatly from his early days favouring the mediums of Oil on Canvas; Oil on Paper; Watercolour; Gouache; Charcoal; Acrylic; Vitreous Enamel, using calligraphy in much of his work. His early vividly coloured geometric patterns were in the abstract contemporary style of the period. From the early 1980's his style developed into lyrical abstraction. Later with the transition to landscape scenes, typically of the Irish borders and coast, many layers of paint are used to build depth into each picture. In reference to these paintings Henderson says, "In my paintings the time of day is indeterminable, the weather changeable, something has happened or is about to happen".In 1986 Ted Hickey, Keeper of Art at Ulster Museum wrote, "To state the obvious these landscapes are not careful delineations of picturesque landscape; they are essentially emotional and concerned with ideas about the nature of art and intended to stimulate and provoke rather than reassure".Wikipedia

Jack Butler Yeats

John "Jack" Butler Yeats (29 August 1871 – 28 March 1957) was an Irish artist and Olympic medalist. W. B. Yeats was his brother.
Butler's early style was that of an illustrator; he only began to work regularly in oils in 1906. His early pictures are simple lyrical depictions of landscapes and figures, predominantly from the west of Ireland—especially of his boyhood home of Sligo. Yeats's work contains elements of Romanticism.
Yeats was born in London, England. He was the youngest son of Irish portraitist John Butler Yeats and the brother of W. B. Yeats, who received the 1923 Nobel Prize in Literature. He grew up in Sligo with his maternal grandparents, before returning to his parents' home in London in 1887. Early in his career he worked as an illustrator for magazines like the Boy's Own Paper and Judy, drew comic strips, including the Sherlock Holmes parody "Chubb-Lock Homes" for Comic Cuts, and wrote articles for Punch under the pseudonym "W. Bird". In 1894 he married Mary Cottenham, also a native of England and two years his senior, and resided in Wicklow according to the Census of Ireland, 1911.

 From around 1920, he developed into an intensely Expressionist artist, moving from illustration to Symbolism. He was sympathetic to the Irish Republican cause, but not politically active. However, he believed that 'a painter must be part of the land and of the life he paints', and his own artistic development, as a Modernist and Expressionist, helped articulate a modern Dublin of the 20th century, partly by depicting specifically Irish subjects, but also by doing so in the light of universal themes such as the loneliness of the individual, and the universality of the plight of man. Samuel Beckett wrote that "Yeats is with the great of our time... because he brings light, as only the great dare to bring light, to the issueless predicament of existence."The Marxist art critic and author John Berger also paid tribute to Yeats from a very different perspective, praising the artist as a "great painter" with a "sense of the future, an awareness of the possibility of a world other than the one we know"His favourite subjects included the Irish landscape, horses, circus and travelling players. His early paintings and drawings are distinguished by an energetic simplicity of line and colour, his later paintings by an extremely vigorous and experimental treatment of often thickly applied paint. He frequently abandoned the brush altogether, applying paint in a variety of different ways, and was deeply interested in the expressive power of colour. Despite his position as the most important Irish artist of the 20th century (and the first to sell for over £1m), he took no pupils and allowed no one to watch him work, so he remains a unique figure. The artist closest to him in style is his friend, the Austrian painter, Oskar Kokoschka.Wikipedia

Colin Middleton

Colin Middleton (29 January 1910 – 23 December 1983) was an Irish artist and surrealist.Middleton was born in 1910 in Belfast. He trained at Belfast College of Art, he was heavily influenced by the work of Vincent van Gogh. He regarded himself as the only surrealist working in Ireland in the 1930s.

 

His work first appeared at the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1938. His first solo exhibition was at the Grafton Gallery in 1944. A damask-designer like his father before him, he now devoted himself to full-time painting. More exhibitions followed in Dublin, London and Boston.
In 1953, he moved to Bangor where he designed for the New Theatre; he also designed sets for the Circle Theatre and the Lyric Theatre. At around this time he exhibited alongside Daniel O'Neill at the Tooth Galleries in London. In the same year (1954), he started his career as an art teacher at the Belfast College of Art and at Coleraine Technical School, eventually becoming head of art at Friends' School, Lisburn. The 'Dublin Magazine' at this time said of him: 'Apart from the brilliance of his paint, he has one rare quality in his inexhaustible capacity for wonder'.

A poet and musician, Middleton also produced murals, mosaics and posters. In 1969, he was awarded an MBE and appointed an associate at the Royal Hibernian Academy, with full membership in 1970. A major retrospective was held in 1976 at The Ulster Museum and the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin. He continued to exhibit at the RHA until his death in 1983 in Dublin.Wikipedia