Cover | Clúdach Angela Griffith (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Cover. Louise Leonard Rush Hour (2019) etching and aquatint Used with the artist's permission historically, irish artists have idealized and romanticized the landscape for the landowner, civic society, and the visitor. As time passed, revivalists depicted the island's untamed, rural surroundings, and its inhabitants, in an effort to reclaim and redefine Irish identity and to reveal its myths. For modernists, the landscape provided a platform for self-exploration, for expression, and to question humanity's relationship with nature. While for some artists nature provides a departure point for conceptual and imaginative investigation, Louise Leonard is an artist who represents. Re-creating observed and experienced spaces is an essential element of her work. Drawing is the foundation of her art; she meticulously records the natural, the manufactured, and the atmospheric to conjure a sense of place for the viewer. A series of sketches of photographs taken on site and recollections of her lived experience inform her work. Leonard has described how she becomes entirely absorbed in the act of making. She isolates herself within a controlled working environment, not allowing herself to be distracted from the task at hand. Her detailed images testify to an exhaustive and concentrated process and a persistent search for meaning and identity as an individual and as an artist. Rush Hour is an image sourced in her local environment. Here, a man-made canal, alongside which nature tenaciously imposes its presence, flows toward industrial and domestic buildings. In this urban environment, Leonard reveals [End Page 157] the lyrical and beautiful. As with all of Leonard's art, the image convinces us of its truthfulness. She is a master of composition, which the artist describes as "everything." Selecting the view and mediating its reconstruction is a deeply considered part of Leonard's practice. The resulting harmonious arrangement of elements beguiles the viewer to look and engage, and they are convinced. Her deft impressions stemming from looking closely at the view before her and absorbing its surrounding sensations prompts the viewer to contemplate and reminisce on their own experiences of nature. The image's stillness is determined in large part by the artist's use of color, comprising a rich, expressive, yet sensitively tempered palette. The enveloping warm hues of a rising sun are carefully applied in measured gradations of tone. Rush Hour brings to light the surprising beauty and the restorative power of mindfully engaging with our surroundings. Leonard is drawn to municipal spaces, an uncommon theme in the Irish landscape painting tradition. These areas are accessible to all, yet they often become too familiar; they are mere backdrops to busy lives. She is an inquisitive artist, finding inspiration in the egalitarian city space, the street, the city garden, the canal walkway, and the park, at home and abroad. Gently flowing through the North Dublin suburb of Phibsborough, the artist's own neighborhood, the Royal Canal, as depicted, wears its aesthetic mantle majestically. Its grandeur references its cultural heritage. Historically, canals served as supply arteries, bringing raw materials and agricultural produce from rural areas to sustain industrialized areas. As these functions became assigned to the past, today man-made waterways in Ireland have become soothing oases, places of leisure. The capital's canal waters encircle its center, and they have inspired writers and artists for generations. Among them the Baggotonians, Elizabeth Bowen, Anthony Cronin, J. P. Donleavy, Harry Kernoff, Edward McGuire, Flann O'Brien, Frank O'Connor, and Patrick Swift. The bronze forms of their literary brothers Patrick Kavanagh and Brendan Behan are permanently seated by the Grand Canal and Royal Canal, respectively. As Kavanagh's wish to "commemorate me where there is water, Canal water, preferably" was granted, many walk the Royal banks with Behan's rendition of "The Auld Triangle" echoing in the mind's ear. While Rush Hour is unquestionably a contemporary work, one that represents the contexts and concerns of lives today, art historical antecedents are traceable. The work's distilled graphic qualities, the silhouetted forms, the balancing of horizonal, vertical, and diagonal compositional elements, and the subtly graded colors quote Japanese woodcuts of the eighteenth and nineteenth...
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Dec 31, 2023
Akshayraj Langaliya 
