Interesting article in The Herald newspaper:
They are the most popular artists in Britain, but you will see no mention of them in any public gallery, culture programme or arts section. Doug Hyde, Fletcher Sibthorp and Sue Howells are among the best-selling artists in Britain, according to a new poll compiled by a leading arts business magazine.
The Secret of Drawing is a four part series, presented by Andrew Graham-Dixon, in which he explores how drawing has shaped our lives. Join him to discover the history of drawing and its relevance to the modern world.
This exhibition is a major retrospective of the work of the distinguished Irish artist Tony O’Malley, who died in 2003. O’Malley was one of the major figures in Irish contemporary art and this exhibition is a survey of his life’s work. Nature and history form the basic themes in O’Malley’s highly distinctive paintings.
Working intuitively over 40 years, he recorded the moods, movement and bird song of the countryside, usually of Ireland but also of the warmer, more exotic islands where he spent the winter. His paintings, on everything from scraps of recycled paper and canvas to the discarded hoops of an old Guinness barrel, also celebrate the medieval and Gaelic associations of such places as Callan, Jerpoint, and Kells, as well as his ancestral roots in Clare Island on the west coast of Co Mayo. Tony O’Malley is now recognised as one of the leading Irish painters of his time. In 1999 he was the recipient of the Glen Dimplex Award for a Sustained Contribution to the Visual Arts in Ireland, while a year later his work formed the central, visual focus for the Festival of Irish Culture, at the Kennedy Center in Washington, USA.
The Irish artistic world has been galvanised by proposals to scrap the country’s long-treasured tax breaks for artists, warning that such a move would spark a crisis.
A committee of the Irish parliament this week heard pleas for its continuation, its defenders arguing that its abolition would be disastrous for the thriving Irish arts scene.
The Irish Republic has long been intensely proud of the measure, dating back to the 1960s, that exempts from tax income by artists, writers, composers and sculptors from the sale of their works. It is said to have helped keep financially afloat struggling artists who might otherwise have been lost to the arts, while at the same time attracting creative people to the country.