RTE in tribute to Seán McSweeney
AS a tribute to the painter Seán McSweeney, who died on the 2nd of June, RTÉ are showing Seán Ó Mórdha’s two part documentary Soul of Ireland - The Landscape Painter on the 13th and 20 th of November at 23.50. After it is broadcast it will be available to watch on RTÉ player.
The documentary looks at the development of Irish Landscape painting, focusing on the experience of a number of painters including Seán McSweeney.
Produced in 2007 Sligo features prominently in the documentary. Sligo was so important to the work of Jack Yeats, Patrick Collins and Seán McSweeney. Yeats was quoted as saying ‘Sligo was my school and the sky above it’.
McSweeney was filmed for the documentary working in his studio in the old schoolhouse in Ballyconnell in North Sligo which his mother had attended as a child and over at the shore and in the cutaway shoreline bog close to it, in the landscape which was such a source of inspiration for his work.
In an article in the Irish Times on the 4 June Aidan Dunne wrote that McSweeney ‘is rightly recognised as one of Ireland’s finest ever landscape painters’.