Fr Jack Hanlon, Painter priest - an Irishman's Diary

I have just written an Irishman's Diary in the Irish Times newspaper about the talented Irish artist, Fr Jack Hanlon (1913-1968). Read it here.

Fr Hanlon was an Irish Roman Catholic priest who also found time to be a modernist painter. He was friendly with other successful artists such of the time, such as Mainie Jellett, and was one of the founders of the Irish Exhibition of Living Art, which provided up and coming artists with a venue to exhibit their work.

His paintings are so full of light and colour. Below are some examples of his artwork in a range of artistic styles from French modernism to Cubism. They are taken from this page on the Whyte's auctioneers website dedicated to his art.

Jack Hanlon (1913-1968)

'Cafe Florida, France'. Image source

'The Dome, Paris'. Image source

'Boats On The Côte d'Azur'. Image source

'Christ Falls For The First Time'. Image source

'Madonna'. Image source

Mary Swanzy 'Voyages' exhibition in Crawford Art Gallery - Cork, Ireland.

A new exhibition has recently opened in the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork, Ireland. It is entitled Voyages and showcases paintings by the Dublin-born artist, Mary Swanzy (1882-1978). It is truly amazing to see these works up close. The breath of artistic styles and techniques in her paintings is also something to behold.

'Cosmopolitan' and 'exotic' are just two of the words that come to mind when I think of Mary Swanzy. She was educated in Dublin and went to finishing school in France. She also went to a day school in Germany. Her artistic training took place in Dublin and Paris and she spent time in Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia and captured local scenes on canvas. In the early 1920's, she traveled to Honolulu and Samoa, where she painted arrestingly vivid and vibrant outdoor scenes that must have seems like another planet to her painting admirers in Ireland.

Another word that comes to mind in relation to Swanzy is 'avant-garde'. In this exhibition, we can see the vast progress she made during her career, when she was painting in different styles from cubism and futurism to surrealism. If you look below, you can see some of the different styles and judge for yourself. Oh and a word of advice - Go and see this exhibition! It runs until 3 June 2019. More information here.

'Market Scene', 1920-21 (oil on canvas).

'Untitled: Window with Airplanes', 1940s (oil on canvas).

'Allegory', c.1945-49 (oil on canvas).

'Girl on a hill', 1913-15 (oil on board).

'Fieldworkers', 1914 (oil on board).

'Tulips', c. 1918 (oil on canvas).

'Honolulu Garden', 1923 (oil on canvas).

Martyn Turner cartoon exhibition in University College Cork, Ireland.

'The Times We Live In: Martyn Turner's Satire'

I was delighted to see this exhibition of cartoons by Martyn Turner in University College Cork (UCC) recently. The exhibition was previously on display in the Epic Emigration Museum in Dublin. It shows drafts of cartoons by Turner, whose work has appeared in the Irish Times newspaper for the last 45 years.

You can get so much into a cartoon and say things more concisely than you ever could in an article. The real beauty of political (or editorial cartoons as they are sometimes called), is that you are not as restricted as you might be when using text to get your message across to your audience. 'You can draw implicitly what you cannot say explicitly', as someone once said.

Seeing these drafts is great because you can see where he made changes as the work progressed. You can see things rubbed out and redrawn or names or words changed. Below are some of Turner's cartoons that were on display in UCC. I have selected a small number of them, but as you can see, he covers a wide range of subjects from the environment and housing to politics, international relations and everything in between.

When thinking of contemporary political cartoonists, I like the work of Patrick Chappatte, whose cartoons appear in a number of magazines and newspapers including, Der Spiegel and Le Temps. Below is one of Chappatte's award-winning cartoons from the New York Times.

Cartoon by Patrick Chappatte. Source: New York Times.

I also like the French review Revue XXI, which is like a newspaper, except instead of giving you the news and telling you stories with text and images, it uses cartoons. Cartoonists present us with stories from around the world.

Reveu XXI is reminiscent of grand reportage articles that appeared and still appear in French newspapers, where a grand reporter journalist will travel to a country where a news story is developing and send back a colourful article full of the flavour and taste of what they find on the street.

In any one edition of the review, you could find wildly different styles of cartoon and stories from all over the planet. It's well worth checking it out, if you haven't already.

Image from a story in Revue XXI by Jeff Pourquié. Source: Revue XXI.