February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
“The landscape has always been important to me; I grew up in the middle of it,” she said.
Quinn doesn’t generally work from sketches or photographs, but instead relies on the bank of memories she built up over 19 years on her family’s farm, before she left to study at Dublin’s National College of Art and Design.
They’re supplemented with trips every few weeks back to her parents’ home, which is a few miles from Lifford.
The current exhibition at New York’s Irish Arts Center has its roots in a bout of flu Quinn suffered on one such visit in the depths of winter, 15 months ago.
She explains in her artist’s statement for the show that her mind was “stripped bare of its clutter” and that she became very aware of the “simple black shapes of crows’ nests” in the huge oak tree at the end of the garden
She remembers looking, in her feverish state, at the oak and the “moon low in the deep blue sky. I began laughing to myself in delight. I felt I had either stumbled onto another planet or I was an infant seeing trees and sky for the first time.”
Her parents, who accompanied her on recent trip to New York, are amused that their youngest child (of 10) could produce almost an entire exhibition from just one tree.
Although the concept of a professional artist had been essentially foreign to them, William and Angela Quinn supported the career choice of a daughter who had been drawing and painting almost compulsively since early childhood.
“Whatever makes you happy” has been the credo they’ve imparted to their large family — most of whom live nearby.
Like many professional artists, Quinn does some teaching, but most of her income comes from the sale of her semi-abstract works, both for public display (clients include the Office of Public Works and Wesley College in Dublin and Donegal County Council) and to private collections in Ireland and Britain.
Prosperity has helped the Dublin art scene. “It’s definitely made a big change,” she said.
While the Brunswick Mills Studio, housed in a 400-year-old building, accommodates more than 20 artists, the neighborhood hasn’t quite developed a bohemian scene yet. “It has that potential, though,” Quinn said.
It’s important for artists, she believes, to work closely with other artists.
However, it’s just as vital to travel widely — as she has done in the past three years in Europe, Africa and Southeast Asia.
Quinn also spent a month in Mexico, which inspired the only painting not concerned with the Donegal oak tree in the current exhibition.
“It’s a very important investment to broaden the mind,” she said.
She uses a camera and sketchbook on her travels, in contrast to her practice at home in Donegal.
“It’s very interesting to see new landscapes and new environments,” she said. Quinn has found that the exposure to other colors “emphasizes Irish colors” for her.
More generally returning from far-away and exotic places, to Ireland and the studio, is never hard for her.
“I’m happy as long as I’m painting,” Quinn said.
“I’m wearied treeless,” an exhibition of paintings by Ann Quinn, will be on display at the Irish Arts Center, 553 West 51st St., between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, NYC, until June 23. For more details, call: (212) 977-6070.