View from the Green Room: Painting the town hectic red
All the colours of the rainbow find their way into the pictures that hang in the Tramore Art Group Exhibition.
The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley famously described the colours of autumn as “yellow and green and pale and hectic red”.
If he had visited the annual Tramore Art Group Exhibition in the Protestant Hall on Church Road, he might have added a few more hues to his bow because all the colours of the rainbow find their way into the pictures that hang in this exhibition.
Maria Delaney’s “Gushing Stream” is a rush of froth and blue over water-darkened black rocks against a soft watercolour of light green trees, while her black and white hooped lighthouse stands stubbornly masculine at land’s end.
Renee Power has been experimenting with shades of blue this year. Her “Exotic blooms” bulge large and bulbous blue on fragile stalks, while her “Wave” moves from azure through to deep blue to remain frozen in time and place on a canvas that will never sleep.
Sleep, on the other hand sleeps easy in some of Paula Brackenbury’s work. Four pictures of “4 Seasons” sell as one item with gentle pastels of items that find their way into our body-clocks… ice-cream cones for summer, sheaves for autumn, opening flowers for spring and icy blasts for autumn.
A button-red “Toadstool” sits easily in its frame, while “Mum’s love” sees a cuddling Dumbo on her mother’s trunk as she snuggles down for the night.
Brigid McCormack has a striking portrait of a young boy in a sailor’s cap with a winning smile that would light up a dark day. She’s also paired two canvasses of indigenous children with curious expressions in traditional garb that draw you in and set you wondering.
Rina Piercy has only two canvasses this year but her quirkily titled “At home with mother” that features a duck complete with her clutch of chicks at water’s edge brings many affectionate smiles.
Terry Power’s work also features a small flock of wading birds in dramatic black that appears even more powerful when contrasted with the dark sea of surrounding dark.
A similar seascape of dark skies and blue black rocks form the basis of her triptych of Garrarus. Pauline Kennedy loves places and their stories. A frozen pond and bleak, wintry trees in “Minus five behind the Halfway House” and a snow-covered Victoria Street in “The Beast from the East”, along with a cold watercolour of “Drama in Bonmahon”, which shivers many timbers.
Bernie Kane has been experimenting with etchy graphic shapes over a background of warm, autumnal pastels that swirl around her canvasses, such as “Dawn to Dusk” and “Circular Dreams”, where a sense of fleeting time anchors somewhere beneath the work. And I love the drama of a pair of puffins atop a rock as they wait for a forgetful fish.
Rosemary Chapman’s work always attracts admirers. “The Old Racecourse” is here reminding us all of what might have been. Pools of moss and lichen float a colourful canvas of greens and ambers and barely browns, while Brownstown Head’s twin towers stand mute witness in the distance.
All the colours of the season wander and warm us into life in Rosemary’s “Summertime”; greens, blues, lemons and whites bounce across each other and explode into life in “Springtime”, while her “Daisy Daisy” is a colourful joy that would brighten a dismal day’s sad reflections.
Tramore Art Group Exhibition is one of the longest exhibitions I know of. Although the canvasses are fewer and the number of artists has fallen, it remains one of the most important and well-attended exhibitions in the South East.
