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Tag Archives: Lithography


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Death of American-Born Painter Charles Brady

Charles Brady, American-born painter who spends most of his life in Ireland, dies in Dublin on August 1, 1997.

Brady is born on July 27, 1926, in New York City, the son of Arthur Brady, an industrial hardware merchant. He is best known for small-scale paintings of still life and landscape. At the end of World War II, while serving with the United States Navy, he suffers an accident which results in his discharge. As a result of this, he has the opportunity of pursuing further study. In 1948, he enrolls at the Art Students League of New York. Founded in 1875 and distinguished by its progressive approach to art education, it is one of the most important art schools in the United States in the early twentieth century.

Initially, Brady studies design and fashion before studying fine art under John Groth and Morris Kantor. In 1949, he becomes Groth’s assistant. In 1950, his work is included in the exhibition “American Painting 1950,” held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, where he is employed as a guard at the time. Around this time, he meets artists associated with abstract expressionism such as Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock, and exhibits with them in exhibitions such as the “9th Street Show” (1951). Four years later, his first solo exhibition is held at the Urban Gallery, New York. By this time, his father, mother, and a younger brother have all died. In 1956 he decides to leave New York and spend some time in Ireland.

On his arrival, Brady bases himself in Lismore, County Waterford, where the landscapes he begins to paint are in contrast to the abstract style he had developed in New York. In May 1956, he joins his aunt and uncle on a tour that include London and Paris. He remains in Ireland until early in 1958 and during this time becomes acquainted with such figures as Camille Souter, Frank Morris and Desmond McAvock. Though he spends the next year in the United States, he soon decides to return to Ireland. In 1959 he is living in Dublin, where, along with artists such as Noel Sheridan and Patrick Pye, he is involved in founding the Independent Artists group. His work is included in the group’s first exhibition in 1960.

Also in 1960, Brady marries Eelagh Noonan, and the couple go to live in Spain. On their return to Ireland in 1961, they settle in Dún Laoghaire, where he begins to produce still lifes of objects such as envelopes and boxes painted in muted tones. Though figurative, the painterly quality of these works and the way in which they assert the flat nature of the picture plane suggest something of his experience of postwar American abstract art. Soft, hazy light, another key characteristic of his work, can also be seen in his paintings of Sandymount Strand, which might be compared with the work of Nathaniel Hone the Younger, whose work Brady had seen on his first trip to Ireland. He also works in other media, producing lithographs and, from the mid-1980s, small bronzes of such mundane objects as discarded bus tickets.

From 1976 to 1983 Brady lectures in painting at the National College of Art and Design. In 1981 he becomes a member of Aosdána and in 1994 he is elected an honorary member of the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA). He exhibits regularly in Ireland at venues such as the RHA. He receives a number of awards including the P. J. Carroll award at the Irish Exhibition of Living Art as well as the Douglas Hyde Gold Medal and the landscape award at the Oireachtas exhibitions of 1973 and 1989 respectively.

Brady dies of cancer at the age of 71 on August 1, 1997, in Dublin. He is buried in Shanganagh Cemetery, Shankill, County Dublin. His work can be found in collections such as those of the Arts Council of Ireland, Bank of Ireland, Ulster Museum, Allied Irish Bank, and Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

(From: “Brady, Charles” by Rebecca Minch, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009 | Pictured: “Charles Brady, 1967,” oil on board by Koert Delmonte)


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Birth of Noreen Rice, Northern Irish Artist

Noreen Rice, Irish artist, is born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on February 19, 1936. She exhibits for fifty years and works in the United States, France and Switzerland. Her work is included in the United Nations collection.

Rice is born to Johnny Rice and his wife Nell (née Hayes). Her mother can sing, and her father is a master mason. Her mother’s singing brings in extra money after her father is posted overseas during World War II. She goes to Methodist College Belfast and by the age of fourteen is living in the family home with lodgers as her parents are in Africa where her father is working. She is not academic and takes only a passing interest in becoming a secretary. A school friend says that all she wants to do is draw.

The artist Gerard Dillon comes from Belfast. He helps Rice after they are introduced to each other by her piano teacher in 1951. He is friends with the painter George Campbell. They both share “an interest in bohemian characters.” She regards both Dillon and Campbell as her mentors for decades and her work is of a similar surrealistic and primitive style.

In 1956, Rice completes her first solo exhibition at the British Council in Hong Kong. She had been there since 1954 doing typing and practicing her painting. Her father is working there, and she stays in Hong Kong until the following year. When she returns, she earns money working night shifts in the BBC newsroom.

Gerard Dillon and his sister, Mollie, have a property on London‘s Abbey Road in 1958. They rent part of the house to artist Arthur Armstrong, and they rent a flat to Rice and her brother. Dillon and Rice would tour junk yards to find objects like leather and string that they include in their artwork. The house is known for its ex-pat Irish artists which also include Aidan Higgins and Gerry Keenan.

In 1963, Rice goes to the United States to exhibit, and she has to be persuaded to find time to meet President Kennedy. This is three weeks before he is killed in Dallas. In 1967, she is in Paris learning lithography and marries the German contemporary artist Haim Kern. Their child Tristran is born, and the marriage soon ends, and she leaves for Switzerland.

Rice marries again after she returns to Ireland to live in County Fermanagh. They have a daughter who is named Trasna. She exhibits twice in Belfast. In 1997, a large collaboration with Felix Anaut results in images of Adam and Eve which is prepared for a Spanish arts festival near Zaragoza. Another large commission is to decorate the shutters of Pushkin House at Baronscourt for Alexandra Hamilton, Duchess of Abercorn, in 2005.

Rice dies in County Monaghan on March 23, 2015, where she had lived for twenty years. She completes her last exhibition in 2009, over fifty years after her first in Hong Kong. She has exhibited and had her work in notable collections including the United Nations. She is noted for only creating art when she wanted to, she had never conformed, Aeneas Bonner says in her obituary “Normality was a not a close acquaintance.”


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Birth of Watercolourist Michael Angelo Hayes

Painter Michael Angelo Hayes is born in Waterford on July 25, 1820. Probably the best 19th century painter of animals in Ireland, Hayes is most accomplished as a watercolourist, although he occasionally uses oils.

Hayes is the son and pupil of Tipperary watercolour miniaturist Edward Hayes RHA. It is clear from his christening that he is expected to become an artist.  Fortunately, the younger Hayes is a talented draughtsman, and by his late teens has acquired something of a reputation as a painter of horses and military subjects.

Hayes begins showing at the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) in 1837, then for three years 1840-1842.  In 1842, he is appointed Military Painter-in-ordinary to the Lord Lieutenant.  He passes the next few years in London, where he exhibits watercolours at the New Society of Painters in Water Colours, of which he is elected an Associate Member in 1848, the same year he makes his one and only contribution to the Royal Academy of Arts.

Returning to Dublin, Hayes resumes exhibiting at the RHA, at the same time becoming involved in its administration.  He is elected an Associate member in 1853, a full Academician the following year, and Secretary in 1856.  The affairs of the Academy are totally disorganized at the time, inducing Hayes and others to resolve the situation.  His efforts to reform the institution and secure its finances meets with entrenched opposition from older members, which results in Hayes being removed from his post, although he is successfully reinstated in 1861.

Not long afterwards he is appointed secretary to the Lord Mayor of Dublin, Peter McSwiney, who happens to be his brother-in-law, and later becomes City Marshal in 1867.  He continues as Secretary of the RHA until he resigns in 1870, and continues showing until 1874.

Hayes makes a special study of horses in motion, and in 1876 publishes his conclusions in an illustrated pamphlet, The Delineation of Animals in Rapid Motion.  One of his Dublin paintings, Sackville Street, Dublin, depicts a view of Dublin’s premier street in the 1850s. The painting is a documentary of social life in Dublin. It achieves widespread popularity when reprinted as a lithograph.

Michael Angelo Hayes dies prematurely in 1877 in a tragic drowning accident at his home.