Dramatic skies, open landscapes and the farmhouse where she grew up in East Donegal all inspire Irish artist Ann Quinn …
How do you define your work?
My paintings are how I see the world around me. Many of my paintings are a visual diary and an emotional interpretation of events in my life, featuring people and places that are dear to me. I make paintings in order to have a conversation with, or tell a story to the viewer. When I produce a body of work I feel as if each painting is a chapter of one book.
‘Car Race At Dusk’ 2022
How and where do you work?
I moved back to my home county Donegal in 2017 after renting studios around Dublin City since graduating from NCAD in 2000. I work from my studio in my house, it’s a five minute walk from my family farm where I grew up. I use my own photographs as a starting point in my work, photos I’ve taken in places I feel strongly connected to. I look for atmosphere and a story when I’m out walking with my camera. It’s always unexpected when an idea for a painting comes to me. Sometimes it feels urgent, so that I must make the painting as soon as possible. I have always worked on one painting at a time and turn each painting to the wall when it’s finished. So I don’t see the paintings collectively until they’re hanging in the gallery.
‘Where the River Finn meets the River Mourne to form the River-Foyle’ 2022
Tell us about the current exhibition and your inspiration?
Many of the paintings in my current exhibition “Twilight Time” are set at twilight or during winter. I prefer the raw mood and light of a season when the elements of nature are stripped to their bare essentials. They are also based on the places where I’ve spent my time in recent years: East Donegal, Dublin and one painting is from a trip to Yorkshire. Some of this work is also influenced by films I watched in 2020 and 2021 as films replaced travelling for me during the pandemic and while I recovered from a back injury. I returned to Dublin for the first time in September 2021 after a year and eight months in Donegal. Five works in the exhibition are based on locations in Dublin, such as the bus stop outside the Hugh Lane where I wait to get the bus back to Donegal, or a lone seagull in St Stephen’s Green Park that somehow reminded me of my cat Lucy.
‘Twilight on Harrington Street’ 2022
What do you enjoy most about what you do?
I love making paintings, it is such a healing and meditative way to spend time. When a painting is going well I feel a deep sense of meaning. It is a hugely rich experience to be able to move people with an exhibition that I created, that they enter the space and feel something from the work – that I communicated a feeling to the viewer. The moment I see the painting start to come alive and take on a life of its own is also an incredible moment. I love the exhilarating feeling of seeing something, that stops me in my tracks and I know that I must make a painting out of this.
Need to Know: “Twilight Time” by Ann Quinn is at Taylor Galleries, 16 Kildare Street, Dublin 2 from October 6-28; www.taylorgalleries.ie.
