ON THE TOWN/Catherine Foley:Painters and art practitioners crammed in to Dublin's Hugh Lane Gallery to hear Anne Madden speak about what it is to be a painter. Her lecture was entitled "Quest: Some Reflections on Being a Painter".
Artist Maria Simonds-Gooding, all the way from Dún Chaoin, where she lives in Co Kerry, came to hear her friend speak. She's also in Dublin for the RHA Annual Art Exhibition, which opens tomorrow. Today is known as "Varnishing Day" in the RHA at Ely Place, from the days when painters used to paint a last coat of varnish on their work.
John Kirwan, whose own show is running at the Molesworth Gallery,recalled "working as a scenic painter to make a living as an artist" in the Gate Theatre in 1988 when Louis Le Brocquy, the painter and Madden's husband, was designer of the set for Waiting for Godot.
Also present were painters Patrick Scott, Guggi, Corban Walker, Marie Carroll and her husband, Des Murrie, Alice Maher and her husband, painter Dermot Seymour, whose own show, Dog, opened in the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery on Great Strand Street in Dublin 1, last Thursday.
The Thomastown, Co Kilkenny-based artist, Hughie O'Donoghue, came with his wife, Clare O'Donoghue.
They chatted to art academic Dr Rosemary Mulcahy, before Madden's talk, which was accompanied by a video by her son, Pierre Le Brocquy, showing her working on a ceiling commission in Carros, France.
Also a series of 12 recent paintings, A Space of Time, by Madden, were temporarily on view in the gallery for the evening.
Paintings "can show us our possible grandeur", said Madden. "It's what we leave behind us, it's the residue. It's the other side of human barbarity, just as love is." Painting "is an essential part of human experience," she said.
"Becoming part of the universe is part of our problem . . . We are alone, alienated and not even sure of our own existence in this world let alone the next: landscape confirms existence . . .
" Many are obsessed with places. I am frequently assailed by doubt like most artists. It is necessary. I am driven by some compulsion beyond reason."
She compared her life as a painter to being "on a constant journey . . . into the unknown ".
At one stage in her painting, "I felt I was on a mental precipice, on a tightrope," she said. Finally, "it is the abstract qualities that excite me in painting."