Lodestar | Leuven 2023

Cristín Leach is one of Ireland’s leading art critics. A bestselling author and broadcaster, she is a Doctoral Candidate at TU Dublin for a PhD by Prior Publications in the Centre for Socially Engaged Practice-Based Research (SEPR). She holds a Bachelor of Arts from University College Cork and a Masters of Arts in Journalism from Dublin City University.

Her art criticism has been published in The Sunday Times Ireland since 2003, and she has worked as an art critic in print, TV, radio, and digital media since 1998. Her writing on art has also been published in Irish Arts Review, Circa Magazine, and by the Irish national public service broadcaster at RTÉ.ie. Her memoir Negative Space was published by Merrion Press in 2022.

In 2020, she presented Ireland Portrayed, a four-part radio documentary series for RTÉ Lyric FM, which explored ways in which Ireland and Irish identity have been represented in art since the 1700s. Through the Canvas, which she co-presented for RTÉ Lyric FM, won silver at the New York Festivals Awards and was shortlisted for the 2019 Prix Marulić International Radio Festival in Croatia. In 2019, she curated the 21st Century Ireland in 21 Artworks exhibition for the Earagail Arts Festival in Donegal, based on a series of articles she wrote for RTÉ.ie in 2017.

She has written essays for artist catalogues, arts organisations, and public and corporate collection publications. She has been a guest or visiting lecturer in critical journalism, art writing, and cultural criticism at Limerick School of Art and Design (MA Social Practice and the Creative Environment), University College Dublin (MA Art History, Collections and Curating) and University of Limerick World Academy (MA Festival Arts).

Since 2011, she has delivered public talks and hosted and participated in symposia and panel discussions on art and the role of the critic and criticism including: Art Criticism Now (The Lab, Dublin, 2011), The Role of the Critic (The View, RTÉ Television, 2011), Doubt and Visual Representation (MA in Modern and Contemporary Art Symposium, UCC, 2013), Critical Writing: Future Modes of Engagement (Visual Artists Ireland and AICA Ireland at the National College of Art and Design, 2013), The Value of Criticism (Glucksman Gallery, UCC, 2016), Arts Broadcasting in Ireland (Limerick Media and Arts Conference, 2016), Everyone’s a Critic (RTÉ Cruinniú na Casca, Dublin Castle, 2017), Where Are The Critics? (Limerick Media and Arts Conference, 2021).

Her short fiction and creative non-fiction have been published in Winter Papers 3, 5 and 7 and broadcast on RTÉ Radio 1. She was Writer in Residence for the Hearsay International Audio Arts Festival in 2021. Her second book, From Ten till Dusk – A Portrait of the RHA in 12 Stories, will be published in Summer 2023.

Since 2021, she has been President of the AICA Ireland, the Irish national section of the International Association of Art Critics / l’Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art. Her critical practice focuses on the moment of engagement and employs journalism methodologies to publish and broadcast in media environments where the audience is “the general public”.

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An Australian-American, Fran O’Neill, was born in Wangaratta, Australia, and currently lives and works between Australia and Brooklyn, New York. O’Neill attended Monash University, Melbourne, Australia, earning a BFA and Post Graduate Degree. Her post-graduate work continued at the New York Studio School’s Certificate Program, and her MFA was completed at Brooklyn College. She has received a Joan Mitchell Foundation award.

O’Neill’s solo exhibitions include at: Sears Peyton Gallery, NYC; Hathaway Contemporary, Atlanta, GA; West End Gallery, Melbourne, Australia; David Schweitzer Contemporary, Bushwick, New York; Miller Gallery, Cincinnati, OH; BMG Gallery, Adelaide, Australia; TW Fine Art, Brisbane, Australia; Life on Mars Gallery, Brooklyn, New York, John Davis Gallery, New York; New York Studio School, New York; andSussex College, Hastings, UK. In 2016 her work was exhibited at MOCA in Jacksonville, Florida in a group exhibition titled Confronting the Canvas: Women of Abstraction, and most recently her work was included in Vital Presence, curated by David Cohen at 1GAP Gallery, in Brooklyn.

O’Neill’s work has been included in various group shows throughout the USA and in Australia. She has recently taught at the New York Studio School, Arts Students League and Pratt Institute. Her work resides in private collections in the USA, Australia and UK, and in the permanent collection of MOCA, Jacksonville, Florida.

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Fitzgerald’s paintings are a response to things that surround him in his daily life while also being exploratory and a reflection on the history of the medium itself and its possibilities. He is also influenced by other art forms such as music, poetry, literature and cinema. For him, painting is not just a visual phenomenon but is also a bodily and haptic experience. The material density of his works as painted objects, contrasts with different kinds of ambiguous images where the difference between abstraction and representation is blurred and unclear. Over the years, different, contrasting family groups of paintings have evolved which explore different qualities, procedures and images. Though his works have an economy of means and are usually modest in size, Fitzgerald seeks a certain kind of intensity and reflective experience which is built up slowly over time. A state of affairs exists in his paintings and drawings where it is not clear if everything is collapsing and falling apart or, on the contrary, forming and coming together. Combining organic and constructed elements, these intermediate, transitional domains are what give his paintings their tension and dynamics:

…a painting should be a lived thing, it is lived through in its making and in the viewing, as such it will often contain certain failures or inherent problems. It is very often the case that the unresolved has a lot of truth in it. For me a painting is an entity that should not depend on a fixed one-dimensional face to the world. It is an accumulation of evidence which reflects the life of its own making and the daily life that has gone into it.”

Reviewing an exhibition of his drawings at Guest Room Contemporary Art in Brussels in 2010 for the Brooklyn Rail, the poet and writer John Yau wrote “By responding to his immediate environment, Fitzgerald shares something with two older abstract artists, Raoul De Keyser and Thomas Nozkowski. Fitzgerald’s works do not suffer by comparison. Fitzgerald’s vocabulary is Basic – there is nothing elaborate or stylish about his lines and circles, rough and ragged shapes. He relies on coloured pencils, ink, and collage – nothing fancy. And yet – and this is why Fitzgerald seems to me to be on the verge of becoming an important and singular artist – the work comes across as taut and fresh, brimming with an awareness that the act of seeing is a construction, at once fluid and disrupted.”

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Melissa Meyer received both a BS and an MA from New York University. Her lengthy exhibition history includes solo exhibitions at The Lennon Weinberg Gallery, New York Elizabeth Harris Gallery, New York; Rebecca Ibel Gallery, Columbus, Ohio; Holly Solomon Gallery, New York and Galerie Renee Ziegler, Zurich, Switzerland.

Meyer’s development has been surveyed in two traveling exhibitions—one originated at the New York Studio School and the second at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. Her works have been included recently in group exhibitions at the Jewish Museum, New York; Texas Gallery, Houston; Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey; the Hyde Collection, Glens Falls, New York and the National Academy of Design in New York, an organization of which she is a member.

She has completed public commissions in New York, Tokyo, and Shanghai, and an eight by fourteen-foot ceramic mural for the new U.S. embassy in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Her work is included in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Jewish Museum and many other public and private collections across the United States.

Meyer was awarded a Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome and has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and two Pollock Krasner Foundation grants-2009 and 2020. She was a resident at the MacDowell Colony in 2012  and the Bogliasco Foundation outside of Genoa, Italy 2005, and the BAU Institute in Cassis, France 2016. She is a frequent artist in residence at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York and an artist member of the Yaddo board, as well as at the Vermont Studio Center.

With Miriam Schapiro, Meyer authored the seminal and widely reprinted essay “Femmage,” first published in the 1978 issue of Heresies magazine. In 2016, Meyer wrote an essay for the popular Painters on Painting blog about Jean Dubuffet.

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Tayloe Piggott Gallery

Anne Ryan is renowned for her ‘cutouts’ – virbant, three-dimensional paintings made from card, collage, canvas, ceramic and metal. Many of her cutouts focus on the physicality of the human form – often depicting groups of figures dancing, posing, swimming, frolicking in the woods, even cutting loose in a mosh pit – and are inspired as much by scenes found in nightclubs and cinema as by classical painting and sculpture.

Ryan has said about the cutouts: “I love the freedom they give me. Suddenly you’re not tied to the four walls of a canvas … It’s almost like not painting. I say to my students: stop painting and then let’s paint. And it’s that idea that we stop assuming what we know about painting and then let’s do something, OK? Let’s make then. And that’s when I’m really engaged with.”

Born in Limerick, Ireland, Anne Ryan studied at Limerick School of Art and Birmingham University and was Abbey Fellow in Painting at the British School at Rome in 2016. She has taught at a number of leading UK art schools, including Turps, and has exhibited work at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, CAPC Bordeaux and Kunstlerhaus Mousonturm, Frankfurt.  Anne lives and works in London and is represented by greengrassi.

Turps Gallery

Hastings Contemporary

Since the very beginning of his career in the 1970s, Brian Maguire has approached painting as an act of solidarity. He operates a truly engaged practice, compelled by the raw realities of humanity’s violence against itself, and the potential for justice. Maguire’s preoccupations draw him to the margins of the art world—alternative space, prisons, women’s shelters, and psychiatric institutions—making shows in traditional gallery and museum spaces something of a rarity. Maguire’s most recent paintings directly confront issues of migration, displacement and human dignity in the face of the current global unrest. They are some of his most nuanced and ambitious to date, which he has crafted with larger brushes and thinned-down acrylic on canvas. He works slowly, using photographic sources, searching for that point where illustration ceases and art begins. This growing contrast between the seductive painterly aesthetic and the subject matter only adds to the potential impact of these formidable canvases.

Solo exhibitions include: Rhona Hoffmann Gallery, Chicago, USA (January 2021); War Changes It’s Address, American University Musuem, Washington DC, and United Nations Headquarters, New York, USA (both 2020); Scenes of Absence, Rubin Center, Texas University, USA (2019); Escenarios de ausencia, Art Museum Ciudad Juárez, Mexico (2019); War Changes Its Address: The Aleppo Paintings, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2018); Concerned, Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin (2018) and the European Parliament, Brussels (2012). Recent group exhibitions include: Naked Truth, Crawford Art Gallery, Cork (2018); Demise, Cleveland University Art Gallery, Cleveland, OH, USA (2018); The sea is the limit, York Art Gallery, UK (2016); Conversations, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2014) and Ni Una Mas, Leonard Pearlstein Gallery, Drexel University, Philadelphia, USA (2010).

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Erin Lawlor (b. 1969 in Epping, England) received her Bachelor of History of Art in 1992 from Paris-Sorbonne University, France.

She has had numerous solo exhibitions nationally and internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include “entre chien et loup” at Luca Tommasi in Milan (2021), “Memory of a Free Festival”, at Fox/Jensen/McCrory Gallery, Auckland (2020); “Erin Lawlor” at Miles McEnery Gallery, NYC (2019); “cat on the raz,” Espacio Valverde, Madrid; “hiraeth,” Fox/Jensen Gallery, Sydney; “here to the hidden hills,” Fifi Projects, San Pedro, Mexico (all 2018); “Erin Lawlor,” Rod Barton, Brussels (2016).

In 2017, a survey exhibition of Lawlor’s work, “onomatopoeia,” took place at the Rothko Center, Daugavpils, Latvia, and her work was showcased in “Maleri.Nu/Paint.Now,” at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek Museum, Copenhagen, Denmark, in 2016.

Recent group exhibitions include “10” at PM/AM, London; “Holding Hands” at Union Gallery, London (both 2021); “Hallucinogenic” at Gerhard Hofland, Amsterdam (2020); “Wet, wet, wet: Erin Lawlor, Aida Tomescu, Liat Yossifor”, at Fox/Jensen/McCrory, Auckland; “British Painting 2019” at Space K, Seoul (2019); “A brief History of Abstraction,” Rønnebæksholm, Denmark; “L’Echappée Belle, Erin Lawlor/Bram van Velde,” Galerie Pauline Pavec, Paris, France (2018) (…)

Her work is present in numerous private collections. Public collections include the New Hall Art Collection, Cambridge, UK; the Mark Rothko Art Centre, Latvia; and corporate collections include Kolon Group Art Collection, Seoul and the Nordstrom collection, U.S.A.

Lawlor currently lives and works in London, UK.

She is represented by Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, and Fox/Jensen and Fox/Jensen/McCrory galleries, Sydney/Auckland, and Luca Tommasi, Milan.

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Born in Gorey, County Wexford, Ireland, in 1953, Robert Armstrong lives and works in Dublin, and is represented by the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, also in Dublin. He is a Founder Member of Temple Bar Gallery + Studios and was Head of Painting at the National College of Art & Design (NCAD) from 2002 until his retirement in 2018, having taught at the college since 1991. He has exhibited regularly in Ireland and abroad for more than forty years. His work is included in many private and public collections and has been the subject of essays by writers including Aidan Dunne, Declan Long and Colm Tóibín.

Selected exhibitions include Vision X, curated by Diana Copperwhite, RHA Gallery, Dublin. Participating artists include Norbert Schwontowski, Joyce Pensato, Thomas Nozkowski (2019); Water Mountain – Made in Hong Kong, (solo) AVA HKBU, Hong Kong (2019); Squeegee Paintings, (solo) Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin (2019); Slips and Glimpses, Robert Armstrong and Anna Bjerger, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery (2016); VOLTA New York, Solo Presentation with Kevin Kavanagh Gallery (2015).

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Temple Bar Gallery + Studios

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Eddie Kennedy was born in North Tipperary in 1960 and now lives in Dublin. First exhibiting at the Independent Artists Exhibition at the Douglas Hyde Gallery in 1982, he graduated from Limerick School of Art and Design with a Distinction in Painting in 1983. He was awarded a full scholarship by the University of Cincinnati, where he received a Masters in Fine Art Painting in 1989. Subsequently, Kennedy spent a number of years in New York painting, exhibiting and working alongside established US artists. He has maintained a significant presence in the United States where he has shown with John Cacciola in Chelsea and at art fairs in LA, Miami and Chicago.  Kennedy’s work has also been exhibited in the United Kingdom and Europe. Early solo shows in Ireland included the Tom Caldwell Gallery in Dublin and the Riverrun Gallery in Limerick. He returned home to Ireland with a solo show at Dublin’s Irish Life Exhibition Centre in 1996. Later Kennedy exhibited with the Paul Kane Gallery in Dublin and had solo shows at Éigse, Carlow (2000 and 2009) and was included in the Éigse, 30th anniversary exhibition (2010) at VISUAL, Carlow.

He has been the grateful recipient of awards from the Ballinglen Arts Foundation and TippFM. In 2017 he was the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation award. He was elected as a member of Aosdána in 2017. Publications on his work include Find (2007, ISBN: 978-0-9556736-0-3) and Thread (2012, ISBN: 978-0-9564950-9-9).

Kennedy has been represented by Hillsboro Fine Art, Dublin, since 2004.

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Hillsboro Fine Art, Dublin

Putting together two or more parts into an order is a narrative. Often when starting a painting I have a specific sequence in mind, a self-righteous one with clearly identifiable assignations to the parts. Presuming that the baseline purpose of all critical activity is to unmake and/or complexify a preexisting order, mine is to both answer the urge to express my particular narrative, and to hope for its undoing.

My work is as much a monitoring of my uses and abuses of really primitive psychoanalytic models as it is an articulation of them. I know letting obsolete thought regimes go is the price I pay for cognitive realignment. In periods I have painted towards the comfort and confirmation of what I already know – this always fails – and in stronger times towards upending it. Which imperatives are open for analytic adjustment and which ones are temperamental are not always clear to me.

My work is a narrative retrofitted to the resistance, tempo and mess of paint. Distinctions blur, categories bleed and pollute each other and uncover multiple complicities in their painted incarnations. The material evidence of this process is the doubleness I experience when in front of a painting: the phenomenological excess. This never-perfect-fit between image and its container is both my reward and irritant.
Like everyone else, I struggle with painting’s relevance; I place the point of my continued use of it on its limitations.

Painting’s analogy to skin isn’t new: the painted surface is a hide where battle-scars remain as a record of its experiences. The privacy of painting makes the analogy even easier: I stroke, lick, brush, bathe, in its unmaking I sand and cut. I am drawn to the dumb puns and double entendres of the body, the creases that stand in for other creases, apertures that open in place of other apertures, infantile behaviors that return as adult ones, etc.: thought games that make the intolerable tolerable. In paint I am looking at a viscous flourish that reminds me of something else, but is potent enough to keep me from naming that other thing –.

If consciousness knows itself through (painted) language, it is by mining painting for its systemic/grammatical failures that I can hope to find unexpected outcomes to my narrative. I want to pry the subject away from its infatuation with fluency.

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Currently a full professor at Mason Gross School of the Art, Røgeberg previously taught at University of Washington, Cooper Union and Yale School of Art, and was a visiting artist at Skowhegan in 2009.

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Jennifer Samet, Ph.D., is a New York-based art historian, curator, and writer. She is a professor of Art History at the City University of New York and co-directs the gallery Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects in downtown Manhattan. She completed her dissertation at the CUNY Graduate Center on Painterly Representation in New York: 1945-1975. She has lectured at universities across the country on the subject of “The Role of Empathy in Art.” Her writing on both abstract and representational painting has been published in Master Drawings, Hyperallergic, ArtNet Magazine, the New York Sun, and numerous exhibition catalogs. She curated major historical exhibitions on The Jane Street Group, the history of the New York Studio School, and “Reconfiguring the New York School.” She is particularly interested in the voice of the artist, and has published many interviews with painters.

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Hyperallergic “Beer with a Painter”

Lodestar | Ireland 2019

Thank you for your interest in Lodestar School of Art. We are currently accepting applications for the Work Study position for 2019.

Lodestar | Ireland 2019 is a 10-day painting and drawing intensive held at Glenstal Abbey and Castle, Murroe, County Limerick in the West of Ireland, from 4-16 August. This year’s guest faculty are internationally recognised artists from Europe and the U.S., including artists, critics and academics Glenn Goldberg, Alice Maher, Judy Glantzman, Sharon Horvath, John Yau, Chuck Webster, and Denis Farrell, plus other distinguished guests. The course promises to be both rigorous and rewarding.

The Role

We have one Work/Study position for an individual who is willing to help with light administrative work, social media, driving, act as a liaison between students and staff, and other, very minimal adhoc support to the Director and School Coordinator. The bulk of the support will be required in the first two days of the course, and the last day. The remaining time is yours to spend working as a student artist.

Essential Requirements

Must first be admitted to the course through the normal application process

Be a proficient multi-tasker and a team player with a positive, can-do attitude

Possess a full, clean driver’s license (and ability to drive in Ireland)

Access to a car

Fluent in English

In Exchange 

In exchange for the support required the Course Fees are reduced to €1,500.

To Apply

Please first apply to the course (http://lodestarschoolofart.com/#apply)

Include a short cover letter indicating you are interested in also applying for the Work/Study position

Include a CV with your application materials

Questions?

Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any questions.

Connie Farrell, Course Coordinator

connie.farrell@lodestarschoolofart.com

+353(0)877669622

Glenn Goldberg was born in the Bronx, NY, studied at the New York Studio School and received his MFA from Queens College. His work is collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery, Brooklyn Museum of Art, and LACMA, plus others. Goldberg has shown in New York, Boston, St Louis, and Munich, and is represented by Jason McCoy Gallery, NYC.

Goldberg creates luminous works made of delicate brushstrokes and flecks of color. His intricate designs seem to float off the surfaces and recall outsider art, Tantric drawings and stained glass. A recent series of paintings, each titled Wish, feature flowers with kaleidoscopic geometries of petals on subtly grayed backgrounds sprinkled with black dots. Goldberg’s paintings refer to anti-authoritarian attitudes of the 1970s that brought political and aesthetic movements such as feminist art and pattern painting to the forefront. He states that his paintings “attempt to facilitate the inexplicable.”

In his current exhibition, Of Leaves and Couds at FreedmanArt, NY the paintings bear Goldberg’s language of recognizable “dots” and transparent washes of color and grisaille. At once tactile and ephemeral, the “dots” articulate spaces that are both shallow and deep, alive, and unnervingly still. In a recent review, Roberta Smith said of Goldberg’s paintings: “He builds his images from infinitesimal dots that give the works an ambiguous, almost celestial ethereality and infuse his surfaces with an air of devotional quiet.” In this way, the marks not only construct pictorial space, but are a record of concentrated attention, time, and devotion. The earlier collages in the exhibition, created during an extended visit in Prato, Italy in 1989, utilize line and opacity in an intuitive and deliberate way. They are graphic in nature, though the hand is always felt. As in the recent works, they rely on layering (Goldberg has referenced making pictures “back to front”), and include ideas of the monumental, air, and privacy, within and across individual works.

In a statement for an exhibition at the Albany Museum of Art in 1989, then curator Peter Doroshenko wrote: “[The paintings blend] in a loose philosophical way various western iconography, dream sources, and Freudian imagery. Glenn Goldberg’s paintings contain many groupings, codes or “pools” of reference, molded intuitively from a multiplicity of sensibilities. In taking them out of their usual context and placing them in an environment that is unnatural, the works become both fictional and dramatic. Goldberg’s art flows from an immeasurable vacillation between the grand and the intimate… He does not make epic pictures to be worshipped, though each breathes deeply of the sublime.”

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My Job: Painter