Maurice MacGonigal, PRHA, (1900-1979) Dingle Fair, Co. Kerry, 1974 Oil on canvas, 126 x 100cm (49.5 x 39.5'') Signed Provenance: Taylor Galleries, Dublin This work is one of a series which...

Maurice MacGonigal, PRHA, (1900-1979) Dingle Fair, Co. Kerry, 1974 Oil on canvas, 126 x 100cm (49.5 x 39.5'') Signed Provenance: Taylor Galleries, Dublin This work is one of a series which followed the cycle which the artist called ''The Black Bull calf''. Painted over a number of years the series followed , pictorially, the fortunes of a young black bull calf bred by Liam ? Laoi from An C?inne, Feothanach, West Kerry. A place where the artist had painted in the 1930's, the late 1940's and again in the 1970s. The artist had a strong pictorial interest in animals,particularly cattle,horses and sheep. Without anthropormphising them, he found character and intelligence of their own kind in these animals. As compositional devices he liked to use them as blocks in composing his paintings and often used them along with human figures in the foreground of a painting to create action and a sense of energy. In his later years he adopted an elongated pointillist technique which gave a sense of febrile movement captured in pigment. Using the pictorial idea of foreword motion across the foreground by the bull calf, the heifer calf and two men, seller and possible buyer(a cattle dealer,a young man from Fionn Tr?,(Ventry)with a dancing gait and wild Spanish looks ) he depicts the shapes and movement in the middle distance, as his belief in repetition of form and colour made for an internal compositional thrust or dynamic. Leading the viewer into the middle distance is a pair of European visitors looking on in bemusement at what might seem a medieval Fair day. Following the French plein-air tradition the artist's signing the lower foreground, is a design device as much as autograph . His painting technique deriving from his early stained glass training in the studios of his cousin Harry Clarke was based on the idea of painting into light as if on a piece of glass,so that the particular ''bounce'' to be obtained from a white surface infused the refracted pigment and although he used the notion of Manet's technique of painting white into white. It also gives a particular physicality to the pigments and colours used by him. He rarely if ever repainted as he felt that the ''pentimento''(underpainting)would ''shadow'' the painted forms,so that what one has by way of colour is pristine. His studio technique was traditional and crafts based. Each painting was tackled with clean brushes, a glistering surfaced palette and his pigments laid out in a specific format of from left to right warm colours, white and black and cold colours and the dippers (oil containers) holding a mixture of linseed oil and turpentine, (1/3rd.turps to 2/3rds.linseed oil). This work painted late in his life in the mid '70's represents of great physicality and energy allied to an intense interest in the material folk culture which is here represented in this vivid painting of a cattle deal at Dingle Fair. Ciar?n MacGonigal 2005

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