ELEANOR AND CHRIS PUT MUSIC IN THE PICTURE
WEXFORD-BASED singer-songwriter Eleanor McEvoy will present a pioneering collaboration with the acclaimed English painter Chris Gollon in the Presentation Centre, Enniscorthy on Saturday, March 18, at 8.30 p.m. The collaboration will include lyrics and melodies from the songs on McEvoy’s 2016 album Naked Music alongside 22 of Gollon’s stunning paintings inspired by the music on that album. The exhibition, which opened in IAP Fine Art’s new gallery space in Monmouth, London, last week, has the general title of ‘Gimme Some Wine’ after Eleanor’s song of the same name, which in turn took its inspiration from Gollon’s painting ‘Dreaming of Leaving’.
The McEvoy- Gollon artistic partnership came about after Eleanor bought a painting by Chris in early 2015 depicting a female nude pouring champagne entitled ‘Champagne Sheila’. The work began to inspire the theme for her next album ‘Naked Music’ which featured her own compositions and new songs co-written with Dave Rotheray, formerly of The Beautiful South, and Lloyd Cole.
‘ The first time I met Eleanor we immediately clicked artistically, albeit from a different art form. I was sent a demo for the new album Naked Music and invited to make one painting, perhaps for the front cover,’ said Chris, who ended up doing 25 paintings as he was drawn into the new territory of a woman’s point of view.
It’s not the first time that Chris has collaborated with a musician. An acclaimed artist who has exhibited widely, his work was shown at Art Chicago and alongside Yoko Ono and David Bowe in Root, a cross-over exhibition of contempoary music and art at Chisenhale Gallery, London.
Novelist Sara Maitland’s book Stations of the Cross, published in London and New York in 2009, was wholly inspired by and features Gollon’s paintings entitled Fourteen Stations of the Cross which were commissioned by the Church of England for
a Sir John Soane church in East London.
The book ‘Chris Gollon: Humanity in Art’ by the art historian Tamsin Pickeral was published in 2010 and endorsed by Bill Bryson. In 2011, one of Gollon’s paintings was used as part of the story in the Hollywood film Twilight:Breaking.
In 2014, he completed a unique collaboration with the Grammy-nominated virtuoso Chines accordionist Yi Yao which was premiered to the public at the Henley Festival 2014.
He had a successful exhibition in Guildford Cathedral in February 2014 entitled ‘Incarnation, Mary and Women from the Bible’ which toured to British cathedrals in 2015. Gollon is represented by IAP Fine Art, London.
Eleanor, who lives in Tagoat, is one of Ireland’s foremost singer-songwriters. She composed the song ‘Only a Woman’s Heart’, which was the title track on the best-selling Irish album ‘A Woman’s Heart’.
She graduated from Trinity College with an Honours Degree in music and spent four months busking in New York before being accepted in 1988 into the RTE National Symphony Orchestra where she spent four years before leaving to concentrate on songwriting. ‘Naked Music’ is her 12th studio album and was recorded at the Grange Studio in Norfolk in England.