Hughie O'Donoghue RA (b.1953)
The Ploughed Earth
Oil on canvas laid on panel, 112 x 122cm (44 x 48")
Signed, inscribed and dated 2017

 

The Ploughed Earth is one of a series of paintings...

Hughie O'Donoghue RA (b.1953)
The Ploughed Earth
Oil on canvas laid on panel, 112 x 122cm (44 x 48")
Signed, inscribed and dated 2017

 

The Ploughed Earth is one of a series of paintings by Hughie O'Donoghue sparked by his interest in the late works of Vincent Van Gogh, those paintings created during a period when the perennially troubled artist faced increasingly difficult personal challenges. O'Donoghue's interest lies partly the extraordinary position that the Dutch painter came to occupy in the public imagination. There is a sense in which everyone feels they know Van Gogh, to the extent that the mythology surrounding him, generated in myriad cultural representations, can eclipse the reality of his experience. Rather than revisiting the locations of Van Gogh's paintings - in this case Arles - and although as it happens he did know the locations well, O'Donoghue's strategy was to look to his own surroundings and, in a sense, re-imagine the paintings in that context.

 

 

The context being his studio in North Mayo, close to the home his mother left for England. Although born in Manchester, O'Donoghue is the son of Irish-born parents. His attentiveness to this personal history of Diaspora has contributed decisively to the formation of his artistic vision. From an early age, he visited and stayed with his mother's relatives in wildest Mayo, a magical realm that he gradually learned to appreciate was also a relentlessly tough environment.

 

Place, memory and the lives of individuals played out against the facts and imperatives of identity, economics and the currents of history became his central artistic preoccupations. Painting is, he has said, a form of "emotional archaeology", a means of recovering and remembering experiences, both individual and universal, often forgotten in grand historical narratives. The picture surface is worked and reworked as a charged terrain that will yield up secrets rather then a blank sheet.

 

Major bodies of work have drawn on his father's wartime odyssey, and his forbears' hard agrarian existence. Based in London and Co Mayo, O'Donoghue is a member of the Royal Academy. The subject of numerous solo exhibitions, he is represented in many public and private collections, nationally and internationally.

 

Aidan Dunne, February 2021

 

 

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