Hundreds of affordable paintings will go on sale at the 138th Dublin Painting and Sketching Club annual exhibition, which opens to the public on Monday in the Concourse Gallery at Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Hall. The event, sponsored by Whyte’s auctioneers, will run for two weeks and will feature a selection of some 300 oil and watercolour paintings, acrylics and pastels, lithographs, etchings and drawings. Prices start at €200 and it’s first come, first served.
This year’s exhibition has a special centenary theme – not the Easter Rising but, instead, “100 years of Irish writing, 1916-2016” – and some of the paintings have been “specially created as a visual tribute to – and inspired by – the poems and other literary works by Irish authors of the past 100 years”.
Among the highlights are two paintings by Aidan Hickey: Crazy Jane and the Bishop, inspired by WB Yeats's series of poems of the same name, which is priced at €1,500; and Colm, a portrait of the writer Colm Tóibín, priced at €3,000.
The theme aside, there are plenty of other paintings – including many less expensive works – on offer, including traditional landscapes, seascapes, still lifes, animal, floral and life studies, botanical works, and architectural studies in representational, contemporary and abstract treatments.
Other exhibitor artists include: Margo Banks, Kate Bedell, Patrick Cahill, Betty Christie, Brid Clarke, Fergal Flanagan, Michael Gemmell, Olivia Hayes, Joan Kavanagh, Paul Kavanagh, Tomás King, Ursula Klinger, Vincent Lambe, Pamela Leonard, Pádraig Lynch, Tom Roche, Tom Ryan PPRHA and Tom Scott.
The Dublin Painting and Sketching Club exhibition is open daily, 10am-5pm, from Monday, May 9th, until Saturday, May 21st, in the Concourse Gallery, Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Hall.
