A meditation on the power and grandeur of the Arabian horse
Blood Horses by Paddy Lennon & Moyra Donaldson The Market Place Theatre & Arts Centre, Armagh
Until Sep 7, 10am-5pm
Collaboration within the creative arts is always exciting.
The opportunity to see something from a number of different perspectives, especially text and image, creates a range of exciting possibilities.
Blood Horses, a collaboration between the poet Moyra Donaldson and the painter Paddy Lennon, is not entirely new.
It was published as a limited-edition book last year, and the drawings, exhibited along with readings by Moyra, have been displayed at a number of locations throughout Ireland.
Paddy Lennon is a Dublin-born artist who has exhibited widely over the last 30 years, but he is probably best-known today as a colourist, abstract painter and equine artist.
It is the drawings that are on show here, drawings of possibly the three greatest racehorses of all time. The Byerley Turk, the Darley Arabian and the Godolphin Barb, the founding fathers of the thoroughbred horse as we know it today.
The works consist mainly of head studies, delightful studies of magnificent horses in all their glory.
These, some large and some small, tend to be dark and brooding. You can feel the power and the pulse from so many of them.
This is not an exhibition of bright horse paintings and this is not My Friend Flicka, rather it’s a homage to the classical grandeur of the Arab stallion.
Here Lennon lives by his own statement: “...draughtsmanship, observation, structure and discipline”.