Description

RED BEARD PULLERS

The first of a series of obsessive images I loosely title ‘Celtic Illuminations’. I have always been drawn to the more abstract and mystical style of Irish Monastic Art and manuscript illumination.
The fact that both my paternal grandfather, artist Thomas Fitzpatrick, and his gifted daughter Mary were superb illuminators was unknown to me until about fifteen years ago when I managed to obtain a few of their artworks for myself at auction. I had inherited two of them previously when my aunt died; my cousin found two magnificent religious illuminations by my grandfather and kept them for me so this was a kind of awakening. By accident, I found three stunning works by his daughter Mary FitzPatrick at auction and again I was staggered; here were the compositions -and beautiful ornate Celtic borders almost in the same style and proportion I was using myself -but about eighty years before I had even thought of it.
I was enthralled by the sheer level of craftsmanship and beauty of these works so I embarked on yet another project which ran for over twenty years and yielded more than a few works of religious intensity and beauty. Like a lot of my work of this type it is mostly unpublished so here is a chance to put things right and show a few of them.