seamus dubhghaill

Promoting Irish Culture and History from Little Rock, Arkansas, USA

Tag Archives: Etching


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Death of Dorothy Kay, Irish-born South African Artist

Dorothy Moss Kay (née Elvery), an Irish-born South African artist, dies in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, on May 13, 1964.

Elvery is born on December 3, 1886, in Greystones, County Wicklow. Her father is William Elvery, whose family owns Elverys Sports store in Dublin. Her sister, Beatrice Elvery, also known as Beatrice, Lady Glenavy, is a painter, stained glass artist and sculptor. Elvery trains at Dublin Metropolitan School of Art in 1900 and at the Royal Hibernian Academy school, but promotes the notion that she was “self-taught.”

In 1910, Elvery moves to South Africa to marry Hobart Kay, FRCS. By 1916 they have settled in Port Elizabeth.

Kay is a founder member of the Eastern Province Society of Arts and Crafts. In 1924 she is elected a member of the Royal British Colonial Society of Artists. She paints and makes etchings, and in 1926 her etching Romance is bought by Mary of Teck, Queen of the United Kingdom, at the Dominion Artists’ Exhibition in London. She travels widely in South Africa and sketches as she goes, and is also commissioned to make many portraits of mayors of Port Elizabeth, many of them lost when the City Hall burns down in 1977. During World War II she is commissioned by the government to record the war on the home front, and some of her work is held in the South African National Museum of Military History. From 1927 to 1945 she produces two to four illustrations each week for The Outspan.

Kay’s largest painting is the 1937 work Surgery, showing a patient undergoing abdominal surgery (a cholecystectomy). She portrays herself as the scrub nurse and her husband Hobart as the surgeon. In preparation for this painting she visits three hospitals and observes at least two operations, making 27 pages of preliminary sketches of people and equipment used in surgery. During World War II she paints further medical paintings: Operation in a Base Hospital and Blood to Save Lives.

Kay holds one-woman exhibitions from 1922 to 1955, and retrospective exhibitions of her work are held at the Iziko South African National Gallery in 1965 and 1982.

In her early days at Port Elizabeth, Kay is a keen sailor and is described as “for a time the fastest spinnaker-hand in South Africa.”

Kay has three daughters and one son. Her daughter Joan Wright (1911-91) teaches painting at the Port Elizabeth Technical College School of Art and Design, and her daughter Marjorie Reynolds writes and publishes a biography of her mother in 1989, and a further book about the Elvery family in 1991, and also donates her mother’s collection of works and archives to the Iziko South African National Gallery as “The Kay Bequest” in 1992.

Kay dies at Port Elizabeth on May 13, 1964.


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Birth of Sean Scully, Painter, Printmaker, Sculptor & Photographer

Sean Scully, Irish-born American-based artist working as a painter, printmaker, sculptor and photographer, is born in Dublin on June 30, 1945. His work is held in museum collections worldwide and he has twice been named a Turner Prize nominee.

Four years after his birth, Scully’s family moves to London where they live in a working-class part of South London, moving from lodging to lodging for a number of years. By the age of 9, he knows he wants to become an artist. From the age of 15 until he is 17, he is apprenticed at a commercial printing shop in London as a typesetter, an experience that greatly influences his future artwork.

Scully studies at Croydon School of Art between 1965-67 and at Newcastle University between 1967-71. He is awarded the Frank Knox Memorial Fellowship in 1972 to attend Harvard University. It is during this first stay in the United States that he begins to experiment with new techniques such as tape and spray paint. In 1975 he is awarded a Harkness Fellowship and establishes a studio in New York, where he settles, becoming an American citizen in 1983.

Over the years, Scully develops and refines his own recognisable style of geometric abstraction and most notably his characteristic motif of the ‘stripe.’ Although he is predominately known for his monumental paintings, he is also a gifted printmaker who has made a notable body of woodcuts and etchings.

Scully has his first solo exhibition at the Rowan Gallery, London in 1973. He has his first retrospective at the Ikon Gallery in Brindleyplace, Birmingham, in 1981, which travels throughout the United Kingdom. In 1989 his first solo exhibition in a European museum travels from the Whitechapel Gallery in London to Palacio Velázquez in Madrid and Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus in Munich. He has further solo exhibitions at Kunstsammlung Nordrhein Westfalen in Düsseldorf (2001) which travels to Haus der Kunst in Munich and the Institut Valencià d’Art Modern in Valencia; The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. (2005) travels to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in Texas, the Cincinnati Art Museum in Ohio and finally the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. A major retrospective tours multiple venues in China between 2015 and 2017.

Scully’s paintings and prints are held in the collections of Tate in London, the Albertina in Vienna, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, Instituto Valencia d’Arte Modern in Valencia, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City, the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in Texas, Guangzhou Museum of Art in Guangzhou, China, and the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, China.

Scully has held teaching positions at Chelsea College of Arts and Goldsmith’s College of Art and Design, both in London, Princeton University in New Jersey, Parsons School of Design in New York, and most recently at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich. He is shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1989 and in 1993, and is elected a Royal Academician in 2013. He participates for the first time at the Venice Biennale in 2014.

Sean Scully lives and works in New York and in Bavaria, Germany.