Welcome to the Carrickahowley Gallery’s Lughnasadh show! Lughnasadh (also spelled Lughnasa or Lúnasa) is an ancient Irish harvest festival in honor of the Irish god Lugh, the Tuatha Dé Danann warrior, king, and master craftsman, who vanquishes Crom Dubh and seizes the harvest for humankind. This festival celebrates the bounty of the harvest, with hikes, feasts, traditional music, and art. Our Lughnasadh show similarly celebrates the artistic and musical harvest of the year, with work by four exceptional Irish and Irish-American artists: JB Vallely, Barry Kerr, Daniel Faiella, and Chris Gray. These four artists approach oil painting with a lyrical, melodic, and musical sensibility, informed by parallel and intertwining identities as Irish Traditional Musicians. Like a string beneath a pick or the hum of an uilleann drone, the works of these artists resonate with the vital presence and gesture of their painters.
In the spirit of Lughnasadh, there is a rich and bountiful quality to the impasto, bravura, and alla prima passages of JB Vallely’s paintings. In addition to being a painter, Vallely is also an exceptional uilleann piper, a player of the Irish bagpipes. While bagpipes are generally noted for their inability to be silent, to “play” a rest, one great innovation of the uilleann pipes is that they can in fact be silenced. Like his uilleann piping, Vallely’s painting is unique in its simultaneity of expressive volume and white space. His works are often characterized by a figure on a white ground. This approach gives the figure the primacy of a piped melody, establishing a powerful focal point. But as we listen to this melody, depth emerges in the white ground, like the subtle hum of the drone transformed into regulator chords, revealing the colors beneath and the impasto textures above. Like the pipes, there is an uncontainable and synesthetic vitality to Vallely’s paintings, which perfectly capture the energy and motion of a set of jigs and reels. The figures vibrate and fracture into waves of sound and strings of music.
Barry Kerr’s oil paintings similarly capture the vitality of Irish Traditional Music, echoing Vallely’s expressive and textured vignettes. As with Vallely’s paintings, Kerr’s work is often highly musical in both subject matter and approach, leaning toward the lyrical abstraction of music, but with striking notes of realism in the likenesses of his subjects. Kerr’s alternately impasto and fluid grounds, through which layers of hue and history are revealed, generate a physical depth to his paintings that is paralleled by their pictorial depth. Their drips and alla prima blending create a wonderful sense of motion, visually manifesting the swirling of tunes. While his grounds are abstract, his figures possess a compelling blend of expressive abstraction and realism. Kerr’s likenesses are deftly rendered, with lighter tones modeled over umber grounds, like notes upon staves of music. The dark ground emerges around the features of his figures, providing a sense of emphatic delineation, rootedness—a literal connection to the ground and to place—within which the figures come alive. Through their contrast against the tonal value and realism of his figures, these outlines seem only to strengthen their presence and voice. As in Traditional music, what at first might seem to be the limiting outlines of tradition instead become stylistic roots that connect, empower, enrich, and raise the stakes of the artist’s creativity and ingenuity.
Daniel Faiella’s oil paintings contain the expressive vitality of Vallely and Kerr’s paintings. While Faiella’s landscapes occasionally feature musical subjects, a Traditional musical sensibility nevertheless permeates his work. The responsive subtlety and nuance of his paintings parallel his approach to musical accompaniment. Daniels’s paintings are elegant and emotive, remaining authentic to their source while becoming enriched by his thoughtful and creative engagement. His nuanced use of color harmonies and complements causes the paintings to glisten and vibrate, mirroring the motion of his brushwork. There is a captivating immediacy to Daniel’s paintings, a sense of being in the moment, in the landscape, in their confident, clear, and expressive gestures. Viewing his work is like being present for his concerts, seeing the chords and melodic runs as they are played, experiencing the evocative harmonies and driving rhythms, and being left with a lasting memory of the moment. Daniel’s paintings capture something transient and beautiful, and something of the undeniable music in the landscape.
I am honored and humbled to be able to join this lineup of incredible artists and musicians. While my style contrasts markedly with that of Vallely, Kerr, and Faiella, my own work similarly explores musical themes, capturing rollicking Irish sessions on the coast of Maine, and portraits of local musicians. I am captivated by the shifting play of light across a figure or an instrument, and the ways in which chiaroscuro and tenebrism function much like modal inflections within the music, with the emotion of a tune shifting as if under changing light. If you peer closely, you might see the faint silhouette of a harp in Planxty Damm, and the treeline that is in fact the waveform of the Irish harp tune, Planxty Irwin.
Thank you again for joining us for the Carrickahowley Gallery’s Lughnasadh show. I hope you enjoy the work of these four fine artists.
Sláinte,
Chris Gray
Thanks to her father, Ann has a deep and abiding love of history and her Irish origins, relishing his stories of the ancient Fort of Tullaghogue and her family’s roots in County Antrim.
