Bogwater and Bullwire
Artist
Terence P Flanagan
(b. 1929 - d. 2011)
Datec. 1975
MediumOil on canvas
Dimensions183 x 213.4 cm
ClassificationsPaintings
Credit LineCollection & image © Hugh Lane Gallery.
Purchased, 1998.
© The Estate of Terence P. Flanagan.
Object number1913
DescriptionEqually at ease with oil and watercolour, T.P. Flanagan is one of the most celebrated of a generation of Northern Irish painters whose practice has made him synonymous with the landscapes of the Northwest of Ireland and the Lagan Valley. The Northern Irish "Troubles" which took a particularly bloody turn in the early 1970s gave rise to a number of paintings of psychological intensity which are as an oration to those who lost their lives to the violence. Bogwater and Bull Wire is the most monumental of these works. A strand of barbed wire is strung low across the foreground as though to separate the living from the underworld. Beyond, a light fog covers the bare, calcified hills punctuated here and there by bleached fence posts like grave markers in the landscape. A sense of the sacrificial is both profound and poignant. Yet a glimmer of hope of rebirth and regeneration survives in the two vertical bright green slashes, like blades of grass, caught on the wire above a water-filled hole in the soft loamy bog.
A major retrospective of Flanagan's paintings took place at the Ulster Museum and Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane in 1996.
On View
Not on view
