Ramie Leahy

Last updated

'Ramie Leahy is an Irish artist known for his use of color and as a co-founder of the Kilkenny Arts Festival. [1]

Contents

Leahy attended primary school in Kilkenny and later studied painting and sculpture at various art institutions in Ireland. He received a scholarship to study visual arts in Florence, Italy where he created a series of political works about the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

In 1974, Leahy co-founded the Kilkenny Arts Festival, one of Ireland's first international arts festivals. He was part of the Independent Artists Group in Ireland during this period.

In 1977, Leahy acquired the Dysart Castle, the childhood home of philosopher George Berkeley. He has lectured on Berkeley's history with the International Berkeley Society.

Founding Kilkenny Arts Festival

In 1974 Leahy co-founded Ireland's first, and still most highly regarded,[ citation needed ] international arts festival, Kilkenny Arts Festival. [2]

During this period, he was also involved with the Independent Artists Group a group of leading Irish artists including Cliona Cussen, Brid Ni Rinn, George and Justin Laffin, and worked as forward planner for Wexford Opera Festival.

George Berkeley, Philosophy and Dysart Castle

In 1977 Leahy acquired Dysart Castle and farm, the childhood home of Ireland's most famous philosopher George Berkeley, after whom the University of California is named. Leahy became an expert in Berkeley's early history[ citation needed ] and has lectured with the International Berkeley society in Rhode Island, where Berkeley lived in America.[ citation needed ] In 2008 he held a music concert at Dysart Castle with acts including John Martyn and Katherine Jenkins. [3]

Artistic career

Leahy has specialized in the use of high intensity colour in all his artistic forms from landscapes to political satire and natural history studies. He has variously been described as impressionist to surrealist in his extreme use of his mediums, primarily oil paints and watercolours. Through the 1980s he worked on a series of paintings exploring ancient cultures from Brittany through England to Ireland and Jersey.

Colourist movement in Kilkenny 1996

In 1996 Leahy and a group of high-profile artists with links to his hometown of Kilkenny founded the Kilkenny Colourists Movement.

Others in the group included Tony O’Malley and his wife Jane O’Malley, Francis Tansey, and other Irish impressionist artists whose work involved a particular focus on the use of colours. The group continued to exhibit together, usually during Kilkenny Arts Festival, during the late 1990s. Other members include Paula Minchin, Elizabeth Cope and Mick Mulcahy.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Impressionism</span> 19th-century art movement

Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement characterized by relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities, ordinary subject matter, unusual visual angles, and inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience. Impressionism originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kilkenny</span> City in Leinster, Ireland

Kilkenny is a city in County Kilkenny, Ireland. It is located in the South-East Region and in the province of Leinster. It is built on both banks of the River Nore. The 2022 census gave the population of Kilkenny as 27,184.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Post-Impressionism</span> Predominantly French art movement, 1886–1905

Post-Impressionism was a predominantly French art movement that developed roughly between 1886 and 1905, from the last Impressionist exhibition to the birth of Fauvism. Post-Impressionism emerged as a reaction against Impressionists' concern for the naturalistic depiction of light and colour. Its broad emphasis on abstract qualities or symbolic content means Post-Impressionism encompasses Les Nabis, Neo-Impressionism, Symbolism, Cloisonnism, the Pont-Aven School, and Synthetism, along with some later Impressionists' work. The movement's principal artists were Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh and Georges Seurat.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Galway International Arts Festival</span> Annual arts festival in Galway, Ireland

The Galway International Arts Festival (GIAF), founded in 1978, is a cultural organization that produces an annual arts festival in Galway, Ireland. It also produces new work that tours nationally and internationally, in addition to presenting the discussion forum, "First Thought Talks". The festival maintains a non-profit status.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Abstract art</span> Art with a degree of independence from visual references in the world

Abstract art uses visual language of shape, form, color and line to create a composition which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Royal Hibernian Academy</span> Art gallery, Art studios in Dublin , Ireland

The Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) is an artist-based and artist-oriented institution in Ireland, founded in Dublin in 1823. Like many other Irish institutions, such as the RIA, the academy retained the word "Royal" after most of Ireland became independent as the Irish Free State in December 1922.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Enniscorthy</span> Town in County Wexford, Ireland

Enniscorthy is the second-largest town in County Wexford, Ireland. At the 2016 census, the population of the town and environs was 11,381. The town is located on the picturesque River Slaney and in close proximity to the Blackstairs Mountains and Ireland's longest beach, Curracloe. The town is twinned with Gimont, France. The Placenames Database of Ireland sheds no light on the origins of the town's name. It may refer either to the "Island of Corthaidh" or the "Island of Rocks". The cathedral of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Ferns is located in the town as well as an array of other historical sites such as Enniscorthy Castle and the key battle site of the 1798 Rebellion.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Thomastown</span> Town in County Kilkenny, Ireland

Thomastown, historically known as Grennan, is a town in County Kilkenny in the province of Leinster in the south-east of Ireland. It is a market town along a stretch of the River Nore which is known for its salmon and trout, with a number of historical landmarks in the vicinity. Visitor attractions include Jerpoint Abbey, Kilfane Glen gardens, and Mount Juliet Golf Course.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Irish art</span>

The history of Irish art starts around 3200 BC with Neolithic stone carvings at the Newgrange megalithic tomb, part of the Brú na Bóinne complex which still stands today, County Meath. In early-Bronze Age Ireland there is evidence of Beaker culture and a widespread metalworking. Trade-links with Britain and Northern Europe introduced La Tène culture and Celtic art to Ireland by about 300 BC, but while these styles later changed or disappeared under the Roman subjugation, Ireland was left alone to develop Celtic designs: notably Celtic crosses, spiral designs, and the intricate interlaced patterns of Celtic knotwork.

Tony O'Malley was an Irish artist. He was born in Callan, County Kilkenny, Ireland. O'Malley was a self-taught artist, having drawn and painted for pleasure from childhood. He worked as a bank officìal until contracting tuberculosis in the 1940s. He began painting in earnest while convalescing and, though he did at first return to bank work, he continued to paint and in 1951 he began exhibiting his work.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Culture of Northern Ireland</span> Overview of the culture of Northern Ireland

The culture of Northern Ireland relates to the traditions of Northern Ireland. Elements of the Culture of Ulster and the Culture of the United Kingdom are to be found.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Butler Gallery</span> Art gallery, museum in Kilkenny, Ireland

Butler Gallery is a contemporary art gallery and museum in Kilkenny, Ireland. It presents a collection of works by Irish and international artists from the 18th century to the present day. A wing has been devoted to the work of the Callan artist Tony O'Malley and his wife Jane.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Phil Grabsky</span> British filmmaker

Phil Grabsky is a BAFTA-winning British documentary filmmaker who has received multiple awards for his directing, writing, producing and cinematography.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kilkenny College</span> School in Kilkenny, County Kilkenny, Ireland

Kilkenny College is an independent Church of Ireland co-educational day and boarding secondary school located in Kilkenny, in the South-East of Ireland. It is the largest co-educational boarding school in Ireland. The school's students are mainly Protestant, although it is open to other denominations.

Poetry film is a subgenre of film that fuses the use of spoken word poetry, visual images, and sound. This fusion of image and spoken word creates what William Wees called the "Poetry-film" genre. He suggested that "a number of avant-garde film and video makers have created a synthesis of poetry and film that generates associations, connotations and metaphors neither the verbal nor the visual text would produce on its own".

Arild Rosenkrantz was a Danish nobleman painter, sculptor, stained glass artist and illustrator.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dysart Castle</span> Ruined castle in County Kilkenny, Ireland

Dysart Castle is a castle ruins and property just outside Thomastown in County Kilkenny, Ireland.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kilkenny Arts Festival</span> Annual arts festival in Ireland

The Kilkenny Arts Festival, formally known as Kilkenny Arts Week, was founded in Kilkenny, Ireland, in 1974. It covers a number of art forms, including classical music and performance. Playwright and poet Seamus Heaney gave a reading of some of his works during the inaugural event.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alan Read (writer)</span>

Alan Read is a writer and professor of theatre at King's College London. Read is known as a theatre theorist and cultural activist, with scholarly interests in ethics and the everyday, performed communities, event architecture, and subjectivities of capitalism. Read's work stands as a critique of modernist theatrical orthodoxy critically contesting Peter Brook's idealism of the ‘empty space' awaiting its theatre, a tabula rasa for professionals to enter and exit at will. Read counter intuitively perceives theatre to have been superseded in that populated place by the quotidian performances of everyday life, those that remain for good and ill. Read took up this provocative critique on the National Theatre stage in London in 1994 in public dialogue with Brook's space-designer Jean-Guy Lecat, and joins others in his scepticism of the colonial fantasy of theatre's ‘empty space', including most assertively Rustom Bharucha in Theatre & The World (1993).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Niamh O'Malley</span> Visual artist

Niamh O'Malley is a contemporary Irish artist known for sculptures and moving image installations.

References

  1. "Ramie has the gift but has he enough time". Kilkenny People. 10 February 2011. Retrieved 7 January 2013.
  2. "Leahy, Ramie". National Irish Visual Arts Library Artists Database. Retrieved 7 January 2013.
  3. "Bravery awards". Kilkenny Advertiser. 24 July 2008. Retrieved 7 January 2013.