Conor Mcguire's luminous, exquisitely textured paintings pull viewers into virtually timeless visions of his native Western Ireland. Hoping to convey the region's isolation and relatively unchanged picturesqueness, landscapes privilege small towns, local characters, pristine nature, and traditional music. In these...
Read More
Conor Mcguire's luminous, exquisitely textured paintings pull viewers into virtually
timeless visions of his native Western Ireland. Hoping to convey the
region's isolation and relatively unchanged picturesqueness, landscapes
privilege small towns, local characters, pristine nature, and
traditional music. In these settings, occasional modern details,
wristwatches, camera-toting tourists, electronic keyboards, complicate
the illusion of isolation. The aesthetic choices reflect this tension
between regional vernacular and modern sensibilities, moving between a
gentle, impressionist landscape style reminiscent of Monet and an
expressionist mode in portraits where the canvas edges blur into
abstraction.
A rhythmic quality plays throughout these stylistic variations,
uniting the paintings. This rhythm figures very literally in portraits
of musicians, where musical tones seem to ripple over surrounding spaces
and architectures. In paintings of streets, towns, fields, and
seascapes, meanwhile, a less overt but no less powerful cadence develops
from repeating shapes, shifting forms, and alternating colors. These
paintings, then, invite viewers to experience lives and landscapes at a
different rhythm.