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Hughie O'Donoghue
Title: Where is your garden
Size: 65 x 50 cm
Medium: Carborundum
Gardens and trees have always featured in my pictures. The first
drawing I made from life so to speak was of an apple tree in the back
garden of the house where I grew up in Wythenshawe in Manchester. It
was a small council house with a small garden but was remarkable in
that it had seven or eight apple trees which my father had planted and
these produced a gorgeous blossom in spring time. In the Art Gallery
in Manchester there was a painting by Vincent Van Gogh that had been
loaned to the gallery, it was made in 1888 and showed trees in blossom
in a garden in Arles. It was painted just after he arrived in Arles
and although the trees were in blossom there was still snow on the
ground. The picture fascinated me and the blossom of the trees were
made with large droplets of paint that didn't try to imitate the
blossom but were just themselves. The carborundum print in this
exhibition relates to my memories of this painting and to an old apple
tree in my own garden in Kilkenny and to Seamus Heaney's translation
of the Testament of Cresseid which includes the line Where is your
garden full of herb and spray which is part of Cresseid's lament for
her lost innocence.
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