Up in the Sky with the Swallows & Swifts

Up in the Sky with the Swallows & Swifts

Gillian Deeny, Horseman Passing, c. 2014, oil on canvas; image courtesy the artist and Pigyard Gallery.

Gillian Deeny, Harvest Girl of the Vines Provence, c. 2015, oil on board, 44 x 46 cm; image courtesy the artist and Pigyard Gallery.

ARTIST AND VAI member, Gillian Deeny, was born in Belfast in 1936. She studied painting at the National College of Art in Kildare Street in the 1950s, under the tutelage of Maurice MacGonigal and Seán Keating. In 1958, she undertook postgraduate studies in stained glass at the Centre d’Art Sacre, St. Germain, Paris. There, she worked with French glassmaker, decorative artist, illustrator, and engraver, Jacques Le Chevallier (1896-1987) in his atelier.

Professor Le Chevallier set craft projects for her each week, including drawing from life. One of the models at the studio was an elderly French gentleman, Antonio Nardone, who often wore a black felt hat, striped shirt, and waistcoat, and who, in his early twenties, had been the model for the male figure in Rodin’s famous marble sculpture, The Kiss (1882). Gillian still has seven pencil sketches of Nardone, including a detailed portrait, which was recently exhibited as part of her solo exhibition, ‘Quest’, at Pigyard Art Gallery in Wexford.

In 1983, Gillian moved to St Ives, a place made famous by ‘the exotics’ from mainland Europe who settled in Cornwall after WWII, when the region became a centre for modern and abstract developments in British art, known as the St Ives School and led by Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson. She was living in a two-storey cottage in Rosslare in Wexford at the time and travelled by ferry in her very small car to visit artist friends in Cornwall. There, she later rented a townhouse in St Ives, owned by Barbara Hepworth, which is situated opposite her famous sculpture garden with views of Porthmeor Beach. Gillian fondly remembers this time in her life as being enriched through friendships with a diverse group of painters, sculptors, poets, and applied craft workers.

Upon her return to Ireland, Gillian undertook various ambitious stained-glass projects, including a commission for Galway Cathedral in 1999. She designed and installed four windows in the eastern wall of the cathedral’s nave, depicting iconic scenes from the life of Jesus, as narrated in the Gospels. Gillian has since developed numerous vibrant stained-glass works for

churches, cathedrals, and private collections, both in Ireland and overseas. This includes producing a stainedglass depiction of Virgin and Child in the Lady Chapel of the Church of the Good Shepherd, in Llanrwst, Conwy, and winning an international competition to design the windows for the Church of St. Frances of Rome in New York.

When she was in her 70s, Gillian lived for several years in Vence, a town near Nice in the French Riviera, which is associated with some of the world’s greatest artists, including Picasso, Matisse, Magnelli, and Léger. Gillian remarked that many of the artists ran up bills in local restaurants, offering artworks in exchange –many of which are still on display in businesses and gardens around the town. Gillian bought a small, sixteenth-century terraced house, located in one of the tiny hill villages, known as villages perchés, on the rocky hillsides above the Mediterranean Sea. She describes the house as being situated “up in the sky with the swallows and swifts with views of olive groves in the distance.” She attended mass every Sunday in The Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence, designed by and housing several original works by Henri Matisse.

Matisse lived in Vence in his older years, in a house called La Colombe / The Dove, where he worked on his cut-outs, after his young nurse, Monique Bourgeois, joined the town’s Dominican convent in 1943. Bourgeois told Matisse about the Dominicans’ plan to build a new chapel and asked if he would help to design it. Work began in 1947, when Matisse was 77, and took four years to complete. Matisse’s design for the chapel included three sets of stained-glass windows (in yellow, green, and blue) which flood the white interior with colour; three murals (fabricated in tiles by local craftsmen); the 14 stations of the cross, on the back wall of the chapel; and the priests’ vestments, using traditional ecclesiastical colors. Maquettes for the vestments are now housed in the Pompidou Center in Paris, while copies of the garments are also housed in the Vatican’s museum of modern religious art in Rome. Matisse even designed the bronze crucifix on the altar, the bronze

candle holders, the tabernacle, and the doors of the confessionals, which are carved in wood. In 1949, Marc Chagall bought a house in Vence close to the Matisse Chapel, and in 1962, Chagall decorated one of the chapels of the Notre Dame de la Nativité cathedral with a colourful mosaic.

During the intervening years, while living in Wicklow and then Wexford, Gillian continued to paint, exhibiting her work in solo and group exhibitions in venues such as Dyehouse Gallery, Wexford Arts Centre, the Royal Hibernian Academy, and Courthouse Gallery in Tinahely. Many of her smaller panels are housed in private glass collections in Ireland, Italy, and America, as well as public collections in Ireland and abroad.

The Pigyard Gallery in Wexford town recently presented a solo exhibition by Gillian, which ran from 14 October to 6 November 2022. The exhibition was titled ‘Quest’ and was delivered in partnership with Wexford County Council and the Wex-Art festival of contemporary art, to coincide with Wexford Festival Opera 2022. The exhibition presented more than 30 works from the artist’s personal collection that have never been shown before. Across these new and recent paintings, pastoral scenes are drawn from the landscapes of West Kerry, the Burren, the Wicklow Mountains, the South of France, and her home in Wexford. As an artist, Gillian searches for meaning and beauty in the everyday, which includes detailed examinations of the Irish landscape and the natural world, where she finds quiet moments that resonate across different strands of poetry, philosophy, ecology, and her travels to many beautiful places, that continue to enrich her artistic practice.