In a new series of limited edition artists' books published by Occasional Press in collaboration with Ballynahinch Castle a number of eminent, contemporary Irish artists, taking the Castle as their base, have been invited to explore the surrounding Connemara Landscape and to bring back visual evidence of their encounters. Te books form unique records of these individual engagements, each one giving us a new insight into this wild and beautiful terrain. A Connemara Folio by Donald Teskey is the second book in the series.
Donald Teskey was born in Co. Limerick and came to prominence as an artist through his skills as a draughtsman during the 1980's. Since 1992 he has crafted out a substantial body of work as a painter of the landscape and more recently the western seaboard.
Aidan Dunne, Art Critic, The Irish Times on A Connemara Folio
Connemara famously temps and exasperates painters. It is compelling and beautiful, but the light is quicksilver and never settles for a moment. The urgency and speed of Teskey's responses in pencil, watercolour and acrylic paint reflect the nature of the conditions and the terrain. He gets the linear spine of the land, the sweeping horizontals, the abrupt verticals of mountains and, up close, of trees and bog cuts, as well as the rocky interruptions and undulating sprawl. But in the end everything is energized by light and moisture. Teskey is perhaps best know as a painter of coastlines and, in Connemara, water is simply everywhere. It's in the air you breathe, it's in the distance, either revealing or concealing and, as the great naturalist Robert Lloyd Praeger wrote: " Water entangled in a network of land becomes almost imperceptibly land entangled network of water." In other words, in Connemara, Teskey is very much in his element, and he clearly relished every moment.
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