A painting of the Inny River that flows past Colette’s family home in Ross.

Paintings show how familiarity brings comfort

It’s probably unfair to visit an artist in the days before their exhibition opens. They’ve enough to be at - deciding which painting will go where, printing up their artist’s statement and organising the launch night. Throw in the Christmas hullabaloo and it’s a wonder Colette Kearney tolerated the Celt’s visit to her Kilnaleck home studio.

Holding an exhibition in the New Year is a challenge Colette vows not to repeat. She was unable to get prints made up in time Thursday’s launch of ‘The Land’ in the Ramor Theatre, and then there was a commotion as her framer was set to head off abroad.

“Long story short, he was like, ‘You’ll have them the first week of January’ and I was like, ‘That’s no good to me’.” Much to his credit, the framer came through for her, but had to frame works that weren’t finished.

“That was pretty panicky,” Colette recalls with relief now that she’s on the right side of it.

What was it like, the Celt wonders, to work on paintings within the frames?

“I thought it was going to be deadly awkward, but it’s actually not. If anything, it slows you up a bit. When you’re doing the painting you’re always thinking how it’s going to look in the frame. When you have it [already] in the frame you’re like, ‘OK’.”

We go out to an impressive studio to the rear of the house which her handyman Dad built. It will be disassembled and jigsawed back together when Colette and her daughter Lucy move into their new apartment - which her Dad is also building - back at the family home in Ross, near Mountnugent.

Despite the opening looming, Colette appears calm enough, although she professes: “I’m at the stage where I’m feeling blind to everything now, and think everything’s shite.”

Whether this is Colette being modest is hard to tell, but she’s just plain wrong. Everything is quality.

Her last collection included scenes of country lanes caught during twilight walks with crisp telegraph wires slicing through soft, bruised skies. Colette’s intrigued by this interplay between the man made structures and nature that she sees all around the lanes and fields of Ross.

This theme is carried on in some of the works that comprise ‘The Land’, though this time it’s not wires but the outline of a corrugated iron roof against a sunset sky, a fence post with barbed wire against verdant foliage or a pier reaching out into a still lake.

“There are still the sharp lines of the man-made elements contrasted with the softness and colour of the skies,” she says.

A large canvas depicting a lake scene is the first work to catch the eye. It’s the view of a misty Lough Sheelin from the shoreline at Ross Castle with a gloriously lit sky, where the shift in the tranquil colours is so gradual as to be imperceptible at times. Here the sharp lines of branches and leaves on the shore provide the contrast. You could happily get lost in this painting.

Where Colette has developed her work is through bringing in much more colour. One example is in a painting of a “lovely swimming spot” somewhere between Dowra and Drumshanbo. A pier is painted in a flat stylised fashion stretching out into the centre of the composition with a person captured in silhouette.

“It’s the only picture with any sort of a figure in it in the exhibition,” she observes. “There’s a freedom to it, a brightness, an optimism.”

Colette has yet to decide whether to leave the pier as it is or embellish it. It works either way.

“There’s a lot more detail that can be added but you don’t want to over do it either.”

How she ended up with a pinkish coloured pier is reflective of how she prepped the canvases. She first put down a layer of pinks and oranges, to have warm undertones emerge in the finished work - a tip she gleaned from an artist she follows on social media.

“When I was painting this, the pier was left till last, I had done all my blues and was coming in to fill in the pier how it should be, but then I thought: no, the pink actually works really well.”

The painting used to promote ‘The Land’ exhibition is of a spot along the River Inny which meanders past her homefarm and into Lough Sheelin. It’s part of the natural border connecting Meath and Cavan.

It’s a rather anonymous, flooded spot, one you could find anywhere around the midlands’ damp farms. Why she should choose to paint it, and at this curious angle, looking downwards is what separates Colette as an artist. She has an eye for the quiet beauty and charm in the ordinary.

When you look at it for a while you detect the plants growing under water, the sky and plants not in the painting are reflected off the surface. The serrated edges and textures of the plants painted in the foreground are detailed with such tender precision that if you had a field guide you could identify them. This is exquisite work.

“It’s that idea of the familiarity of where you come from, and the comfort in that,” explains Colette of its significance. “I think what’s interesting in this is my daughter saw it, and my brother saw it, and have gone, ‘Oh that’s the corner below in the field between...’

“We live in a very big world but the land that’s familiar to us, it can be pointed out very easily. It could be anywhere, but they knew exactly where it is because we are so familiar with it.”

Colette’s favourite painting from her previous exhibition was the only work not to sell. She’s determined not to paint obviously pleasing subjects, simple adornments for walls feeling it would be “too easy or a bit contrived” and instead rises to the challenge of creating “something that’s unique”.

“In my mind it was always: do the mural painting as your bread and butter and then have the freedom in your painting, and if people like it or not, then they like it or not and that’s it - and keep going and make the best paintings you can make, and that’s hopefully what I’ve done here.”