GALLERIES
McKenna Gallery, Omagh Tomorrow-December 24
It’s interesting how many people think most landscapes and seascapes are painted on the spot. It may have been that way before the advent of the camera, but after that everything changed.
En plein air or plein air painting from the French became the common term for the act of painting outdoors around the mid-19th century. It spread across Europe and America as it increased in popularity with the convenient production of paint packaged in tubes, saving the artists from making it directly for the palette.
All of this brings us to Ireland, and one of the best known schools of the technique, The Tory School, Tory Island, just off the Donegal coast. This wonderfully primitive school began when English painter Derek Hill arrived on the island in 1956 and began to encourage the local people to paint.
Now to Cornelius Browne — he was born in Glasgow but grew up in Donegal, where his early paintings were encouraged by the aforementioned Hill. The McKenna Gallery says Browne “is now a passionate advocate of plein air painting, teaching workshops and writing articles on the topic. Painted entirely outdoors, in all weathers, at all times of day and night, An Invite to Eternity takes its title from the nature poet John Clare”.
Browne follows a calendar year in the village he grew up in, covering the first day of spring to the bleak Atlantic seas off the Donegal coast in mid-winter. The paintings have that freedom and expression that can be seen in impressionist and Fauvist works, they have that vitality and raw life that can only come from the experience of being there.