Book of Kells

Chi-Rho Page, Book of Kells, 800 AD, Trintiry College, Dublin

The Book of Kells, known also as the Book of Columba, is an illuminated manuscript Christian Gospel book in Latin, containing the four Gospels of the New Testament together with tables and introductory texts. It was created in a Columba monastery in either Britain or Ireland around 800 AD.

The illustrations and ornamentation of the Book of Kells combines traditional Christian iconography with ornate motifs of Hiberno-Saxon art. The existing manuscript comprises 340 folios and, since 1953, has been bound in four volumes. The leaves are on high-quality vellum; the insular script is in iron gall ink, and the colors were derived from a wide range of substances, many imported from distant locations.

The Cho-Rho page dwells almost entriely of the name of Christ, or rather on its traditional abbreviation into the “Chi-Rho” symbol. In this illumination the Chi is the dominant form, an X with uneven arms, somewhat resembling a pair of curved pliers. The Rho stands in its shelter, with its loop turned into a spiral. There is also an Iota, an I, the third letter, passing up through this spiral. All three letters are abundantly decorated, their curves drawn out into flourishes, embellished with discs and spirals, filled with dense tracery and punctuated with occasional animals and angels.

Reblogged with thanks to http://my-ear-trumpet.tumblr.com

Philip Dunne

Watercolors by Philip Dunne

Phil Dunne is an illustrator from Dublin, Ireland, where he lives and works. He received his degree in Visual Communications in 2003 at the National College of Art and Design (NCAD) in Dublin. After graduating he started to build his portfolio with work on his clients’ projects.

Reblogged with thanks to https://k250966.tumblr.com

Calendar: April 23

A Year: Day to Day Men: 23rd of April

The Observer

The Cath Chluain Tarbh, the Battle of Clontarf, took place on April 23, 1014.

The Battle of Clontarf took place at Clontarf, near Dublin, Ireland pitting the forces of Brian Boru, High King of Ireland, against a Norse-Irish alliance comprised of forces of the Kings of Dublin and Leinster and an external Viking contingent. It lasted from sunrise to sunset and ended in a rout of the Viking and Leinster forces.

It is estimated that between seven to ten thousand men were killed. Although Brian Boru’s forces were victorious, Brian Boru was himself killed, as were his son Murchad and his grandson Toirdelbach, leaving no heirs to the throne. The Leinster King Mael Morda and the Viking leaders were also slain. After the battle the the Kingdom of Dublin was reduced to just a secondary power.

Brian’s body was brought to Swords, north of Dublin. There it was met by the coarb of Patrick, the traditional head of the church in Ireland, who brought the body back with him to Armagh, where it was interred after twelve days of mourning. Along with Brian were the body of his son Murchad and the heads of Conaing, Brian’s nephew, and Mothla, King of the Déisi Muman. Máel Sechnaill, then King of Mide, was restored as High King of Ireland, and remained secure in his position until his death in 1022.

The battle was an important event in Irish history and is recorded in both Irish and Norse chronicles. In Ireland, the battle came to be seen as an event that freed the Irish from foreign domination, and Brian was hailed as a national hero. This view was especially popular during English rule in Ireland; it still has a hold on the popular imagination.

In modern times there has been a long-running debate among historians, which is now 250 years old, about Ireland’s Viking age and the Battle of Clontarf. The standard view, and the popular view, is that the battle ended a war between the Irish and Vikings by which Brian Boru broke Viking power in Ireland. However revisionist historians see it as an Irish civil war in which Brian Boru’s Munster forces and its allies defeated Leinster and Dublin, and that there were Vikings fighting on both sides.

Gerard Dillon

Gerard Dillon, “Mending Nets, Aran”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 84.3 x 92 cm, Private Collection

The Aran Islands, dramatically located off the west coast of Ireland, have long held a fascination for Irish artists and writers. At the turn of the 19^th century, its preservation of the Irish language and its tightly-knit community”s traditional life intimately bound to the land and sea represented something wholly other, indeed sacred, from the modernity that was encroaching Ireland.

One of the definitive accounts of this existence was recorded by John Millington Synge, the playwright and writer who first visited the islands in 1898, in his 1907 book, “The Aran Islands”. illustrated by Jack Butler Yeats. Synge’s profound experiences of the island’s communities informed his greatest and most famous writing, “The Playboy of the Western World”, a three-act play first performed at the Abby Theater in Dublin on the twenty=sixth of January in 1907.

By the time of Francis Gerard Dillon’s arrival forty years later in the 1940s, the nature and shape of these communities had been changing as the 20th centruy advanced; yet they still preserved a magic and mystery that entrhalled him. For Dillon, life in the West of Ireland represented a new freedom for him. It was an escape from the conflicts, both internal and external, that had dogged Dillon’s upbringing and adult life in Belfast and London. This release from past tensions fed directly into his painting.

Just as Synge evoked these communities with words, Dillon caught their spirit through paint. His naïve, child-like painting style imbued his work with an innocence, poetry and joy that is representative of both the Islanders way of life and Dillon’s response to them. His paintings are rich visual stories which kept the rich story-telling tradition that was integral to the Aran Islands’ culture.

Dave Whyte

Animate Gif by Dave Whyte, “Drops on a Pond”

Dave Whyte is a physicist by occupation and lives in Dublin, Ireland. His first geometric gifs riffed on computational modules he was exploring while in undergrad. His Tumblr, Bees & Bombs, is updated regularly with new animations created with Processing, an open-source programming language.

The artist’s tumblr site address is https://beesandbombs.tumblr.com.

Sean Keating

Oil Paintings by Sean Keating

Seán Keating, born in Limerick, was an Irish romantic-realist painter who painted some iconic images of the Irish War of Independence and of the early industrialization of Ireland. He spent two weeks or so during the late summer on the Aran Islands and his many portraits of island people depicted them as rugged heroic figures.

Seán Keating studied drawing at the Limerick Technical School before a scholarship arranged by William Orpen allowed him to go at the age of twenty to study at the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin. Over the next few years he spent time on the Aran Islands. In 1914 Keating won the RDS Taylor award with a painting titled “The Reconciliation”. The prize included £50.00 which allowed him to go to London to work as Orpen’s studio assistant in 1915. In late 1915 or early 1916 he returned to Ireland where he documented the war of independence and the subsequent civil war. Examples include “Men of the South” (1921–22) which shows a group of IRA men ready to ambush a military vehicle and “An Allegory” (first exhibited in 1924), in which the two opposing sides in the Irish Civil War are seen to bury the tri-colour covered coffin amid the roots on an ancient tree.

Nuala O’Donovan

Nuala O’Donovan, Sculptural Ceramics

Nuala O’Donovan is an artist working in sculptural ceramics. She was born in Cork City, Ireland. She completed BA in Three-Dimensional Design at Middlesex University in the United Kingdom and studied ceramics at the Crawford Collage of Art and Design graduating with an MA.

These sculptural ceramics combine regular pattern with the characteristics of irregular forms from nature. “The patterns are regularly irregular,” she says. Each part of the pattern is individually made. It takes over a period of weeks or months to construct the form. Nuala is strongly inspired by the history behind every scarred or broken surface. Imperfections are evidence of life force in living organisms. So her work evokes the transient value of living organisms, linking traces of history, the present and the future.

Conor Walton

Paintings by Conor Walton

Conor Walton was born in Dublin in 1970. He studied painting at National College of Art, Dublin and graduated with a Joint Honours Degree in the History of Art and Fine Art Painting in 1993, winning the prestigious Taylor Prize that same year.

After furthering his artistic studies with an MA in Art History and Theory in the UK, Walton moved to Florence, Italy, to master the traditional skills of fine art drawing and colour at the Cecil Studios. The teaching method used at the studio derives from the Italian Renaissance where before any individual experimentation is permitted, all students must first learn the fundamental skills of draftsmanship and the sight-size method of figure drawing and painting from the model.

One of Ireland’s leading representational painters, Conor Walton strives to create paintings that go beyond mere technical competence.