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Fenton Art Gallery: Eithne Jordan & Stephen McKenna
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12th September - 4th October
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Both of these artists have a connection with each other going back over a number of years. Stephen McKenna wrote in his essay for Eithne Jordan’s 2004 exhibition:
Every painting has the potential to contain within itself the whole past of painting, and the whole past of the viewer’s experience…The figurative painter of to-day has been able to recognize the implicit image without predicting it. It comes down, as always in good painting, to knowing which apparently insignificant adjustments to the colour, the light, the space or the line are to be made, and how.
Both of these artists have a strong personal artistic style. Instantly recognisable, McKenna's paintings have a very particular sense of structure and calmness. Jordan’s fluid paintwork and restrained tonal contrasts make her work individual and exciting. Urban settings – in particular European cities – feature strongly in the paintings of both Jordan and McKenna. McKenna focuses on views of Maritime cities while Jordan is drawn to unremarkable spaces within cities, anonymous urban environments to explorations of mundane ‘non-places’: factory roofs, subway tunnels, underpasses and blank walls. Evidence of human habitation is everywhere however the actual presence of people is rare, giving a vacant and melancholic atmosphere to the works.
The paintings and watercolours by Stephen McKenna are based on observations of architecture. The maritime cities of Porto, Barcelona and Funchal are seen in various light conditions – daybreak, dusk, mist and sunlight. The different lights affect the intensity of the pairs of complementary colours, which are used to clothe the underlying perspective structures drawn from the layout of the cities. The constructed towns are seen to interact with the natural geography of the sites, with the sea, the trees, the sky and the slope of the hills.
Eithne Jordan is a member of Asodána and an associate member of the RHA. She has exhibited widely both internationally and in Ireland where she is represented by Rubicon Gallery in Dublin. A recent solo show of her work was held at the Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris in 2007.
Stephen McKenna is a member of Asodána and president of the RHA. He has had several major international exhibitions. Important Irish exhibitions include shows at IMMA (1993), the RHA, Dublin (2005) and several at the Kerlin Gallery, Dublin who represent him.
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Eithne Jordan
Bibliotheque
2006
gouache on paper
18 x 24cm
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