Terence P Flanagan
b. 1929 - d. 2011
Place of BirthEnniskillen, County Fermanagh
BiographyAlthough he paints portraits and still-lifes, T.P. Flanagan is renowned as one of Irelands leading landscape painters and an outstanding watercolourist. He workes in series upon themes primarily inspired by the landscape of the Northwest of Ireland. During his boyhood in that part of the country T.P. Flanagan alternated between Enniskillen, County Fermanagh and summers spent with his aunts near Lissadell, Co. Sligo. Lissadell House and demesne, home of the Gore-Booth family, has strong connections with Irish nationalism and the Irish literary revival through such figures as Countess Markievicz (nee Gore-Booth), and W.B. Yeats, Lady Gregory and John Millington Synge who were frequent visitors. Flanagan's childhood memories of the house and demesne left an indelible mark on his imagination. His early artistic training came from watercolourist Kathleen Bridle whose classes Flanagan shared with fellow Enniskillen student William Scott, followed by studies at the Belfast College of Art.
Though Flanagan taught art from the late 1950s until 1983, a period which included eighteen years as Head of the Art Department of St. Mary's College of Education, Belfast and a sabatical in America, he has painted consistently with regular solo exhibitions in Dublin and Belfast. His paintings from his early career onwards, whether inspired by the woods of Lissadell, the lakeland shores of Fermanagh, the bogland landscapes of South Donegal or more latterly in the vicinity of the river lagan near his Belfast home, are poignant distillations of particular places and are possessed of great stillness and psychological intensity. His lyrical evocations of 18th and 19th neo-classical Irish country houses and their lands prompted his friend the poet Seamus Heaney to describe him as a "hunter of demesne and ditchback". Flanagan's travels in Italy and Greece in 1988 gave rise to a remarkable series of watercolours and for a time influenced his use of a warmer palette to interpret the Irish countryside.
Flanagan was elected to the Royal Ulster Academy in 1964 and became its President in 1977, the same year in which he won the RUA Gold Medal. He has been Royal Hibernian Academician since 1983. His paintings are in collections throughout Ireland, the UK, Europe, The US, China and Japan.
