seamus dubhghaill

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

Tag Archives: Printmaking


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Death of Cecil Ffrench Salkeld, Painter, Printmaker, Critic & Writer

Cecil Ffrench Salkeld, Irish painter, printmaker, critic and writer dies in Dublin on May 11, 1969.

Salkeld is born in Assam, India on July 9, 1904. His parents are Henry Lyde Salkeld, a member of the Indian Civil Service (ICS), and Blanaid Salkeld (née Mullen), a poet. He returns to Ireland with his mother in 1910 following the death of his father in 1909. He attends Mount St. Benedict’s, Gorey, County Wexford, and the Dragon School in Oxford, England. He wins a scholarship to Oundle School in Oundle, North Northhamptonshire, but returns to Dublin where he enters the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art in 1919 to study under Seán Keating and James Sleator. He marries Irma Taesler in Germany in 1922. They have two daughters, Celia and Beatrice. The latter marries Brendan Behan in 1954.

Salkeld works in tempera and oil, as well as etching and wood engraving. In 1921 he travels to Germany to study under Ewald Dulberg at the Kassell Kunstschule. He attends the Union of Progressive International Artists in Düsseldorf in May 1922, and is exhibited at the Internationale Kunstausstellung. Upon his return to Dublin in 1924, he holds his first solo exhibition in the Society of Dublin Painters gallery. He becomes a member of the Dublin Painters in 1927. With Francis Stuart, he co-edits the first two issues of To-morrow in 1924. His studio is in a converted labourer’s cottage at Glencree, County Wicklow. He also exhibits with the New Irish Salon and the Radical Painters’ Group.

Salkeld wins the 1926 Royal Dublin Society‘s Taylor scholarship, and has his first exhibited work with the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) in 1929. He lives in Berlin for a year in 1932. He exhibits in Daniel Egan’s Gallery in Dublin in 1935. He has a wide circle of literary friends, including Samuel Beckett and Flann O’Brien. In O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds, the character of Michael Byrne is designed for Salkeld, reflecting his debilitating alcoholism. He also teaches at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art, teaching artists such as Reginald Gray.

From 1937 to 1946 Salkeld runs a private press called Gayfield Press. This is co-founded with his mother, and operates from a garden shed at their home, 43 Morehampton Road. The press is a small Adana wooden hand press. He illustrates her 1938 The Engine Left Running, as well as Ewart Milne‘s Forty North Fifty West (1938) and Liam O’Flaherty‘s Red Barbara and Other Stories (1928). In 1951, he loans the press to Liam and Josephine Miller to found the Dolmen Press.

Salkeld’s most famous public work is his 1942 three-part mural in Davy Byrne’s pub. He is a co-founder of the Irish National Ballet School in the 1940s in his capacity as a pianist. In 1946 he is appointed an associate member of the RHA. In 1953 his play Berlin Dusk is staged at 37 Theatre Club, Dublin. During the 1950s he is a broadcaster with Radio Éireann as well as a director of cultural events for An Tóstal. He dies on May 11, 1969 in St. Laurence’s Hospital, Dublin.

The National Gallery of Ireland holds a portrait by Salkeld of his daughter, Celia.

(Pictured: “The Climber” by Cecil Ffrench Salkeld, oil on canvas)


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Birth of Neil Shawcross, Post-Impressionist Artist

Neil Shawcross MBE, RHA, HRUA, Post-Impressionist artist, is born in Kearsley, Lancashire, England, on March 15, 1940. He has been a resident of Northern Ireland since 1962.

Shawcross studies at Bolton College of Art from 1955 to 1958, and Lancaster College of Art from 1958 to 1960, before moving to Belfast in 1962 to take up a part-time lecturer’s post at the Belfast College of Art, becoming full-time in 1968. He continues to lecture there until his retirement in 2004.

Primarily a portrait painter, his subjects include Nobel Prize winning poet Seamus Heaney, novelist Francis Stuart (for the Ulster Museum), former Lord Mayor of Belfast David Cook (for Belfast City Council), footballer Derek Dougan and fellow artists Colin Middleton and Terry Frost. He also paints the figure and still life, taking a self-consciously childlike approach to composition and colour. His work also include printmaking, and he has designed stained glass for the Ulster Museum and St. Colman’s Church, Lambeg, County Antrim.

Shawcross’s academic career includes a residency at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in Amherst, Virginia in 1987, a residency at Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vermont in 1991, and a visiting assistant professorship at Pennsylvania State University in 1993.

Shawcross has exhibited nationally, with one-man shows in London, Manchester, Dublin and Belfast, and internationally in Hong Kong and the United States, and his work is found in many private and corporate collections.

Shawcross is elected an Associate of the Royal Ulster Academy of Art in 1975, and is made a full Academician in 1977. He wins the Academy’s Conor Award in 1975, its gold medal in 1978, 1982, 1987, 1994, 1997 and 2001, and its James Adam Prize in 1998. He is also a member of the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA). He is awarded the Gallaher Portrait Prize in 1966.

Shawcross is conferred an honorary doctorate by Queen’s University Belfast in 2007. He is appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2014 New Year Honours for services to arts in Northern Ireland.

In 2010, the Merrion Hotel, Dublin, hosts a private collection of the works of Shawcross. In 2015, he exhibits a collection of six foot tall book covers inspired by original Penguin paperbacks at the National Opera House in Wexford, County Wexford. In 2018, he donates to Belfast City Council a collection of 36 paintings dedicated to ‘Writers of Belfast’ in a show of appreciation to his adopted home city. A major retrospective of his works are exhibited at the F. E. McWilliam Gallery and Studio, Banbridge, County Down, in the same year.

Shawcross is a Patron of the charity YouthAction Northern Ireland. He lives in Hillsborough, County Down, Northern Ireland.


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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.