Eddie Kennedy: Lines of Engagement

Source Arts Centre, Thurles, Tipperary

May 31 – June 28, 2025

 

Eddie Kennedy writes: I’m delighted to be sharing my paintings here at the Source in Thurles. It is a home coming for me, as I was born here in Thurles. My own source is nearby: in the parishes of Drom and Inch and Templemore, in the townlands of Barnane and Ballyheen, under the Devil’s Bit Mountain.

In a rare and recent interview with the painter Frank Auerbach, not long before he died last year at the age of 94, when asked how he thought of his work, looking back over his long painting life, he stated that it wasn’t up to him to judge, but that looking back on it now, with the benefit of hindsight, he was satisfied that he had been “working on his own frontier”. I am sympathetic to this poetic understanding of the endeavour to make paintings, working on the frontier of what one knows, and hopefully venturing further than that. I find it thrilling and evocative and liberating, this commitment to an unrelenting search for authenticity.

My exhibition at Rathfarnham Castle from April 13th to June 2nd last year was titled Frontier, acknowledging the Castle’s historic position as the first fortified house on the edge of the land held by the English in Elizabethan Ireland, and my sense of my position as a painter working on the borders of what I know. These concerns continued with Vocatus, my most recent exhibition of paintings at Hillsboro Fine Art in Dublin last August.

So, in preparing for this exhibition at the Source over the past months, I have had in mind a title that continues to hold the ideas of Frontier as central to my current preoccupations…so Lines of Engagement is the title of my exhibition in Thurles. It sets the stage for the intention out of which the paintings emerge…the elusiveness of finding the image and then holding it….I am reminded of my father and his description of catching trout with his bare hands when he was a boy…tickling fish, he called it. Now you have to be in a good relationship with the river for that to happen.

T. S. Eliot described it as: “each venture is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate”; similarly, Seamus Heaney articulates beautifully the process: “the crucial action is pre-verbal, to be able to allow the first alertness or come-hither, sensed in a blurred or incomplete way, to dilate and approach as a thought or as a phrase”. Philip Guston also spoke about attempts at the way in, remarking on how when one begins the act of painting, the studio is crowded with all our concerns which we bring with us. As we work, they begin to leave one by one, until eventually we are left alone. Then, if we are really lucky, we leave also. There is a ring of rightness to this understanding that I know to be true from personal experience.

It is with gratitude for the inspiration and example of these and other extraordinary artists that each time I begin, a new journey of discovery.