Ita Freeney: Water’s Edge art inspired by her views in East Cork
The Cork art stalwart also recalls painting adverts on buses with her dad
Ita Freeney pictured at the opening of her exhibition Water’s Edge at the Custom House Studios Gallery in Westport. Picture: Conor McKeown
MON, 19 FEB, 2024 - 02:00
MARC O’SULLIVAN VALLIG
Ita Freeney’s work is known for its Zen-like stillness. A lover of the great outdoors, her new exhibition at the Custom House Gallery in Westport, Co Mayo features a body of paintings inspired by walks near her home in East Cork and Ballycastle, Co Mayo, where she has been a regular visitor.
“I’ve called the exhibition Water’s Edge. Our house in Glounthane overlooks the estuary of the River Lee, so that’s been an obvious influence,” she says. “This particular series of paintings is very much about the boundary between land and water. I don't know what fascinates me so much about that. I think it's just a contrast between the hardness of the land - and manmade structures like the piers - and the openness and airiness of the water and sky.
“I usually gravitate towards the quiet. But there’s one painting in the show that's inspired by the old fisherman's pier in Cobh. It's a very busy place, and it's very unlike me to have gone for this subject matter, because it's all old bins and containers. But I think that's just what I liked about it; that row of bins and things against the sky.”
Freeney’s association with Ballycastle came about through the Ballinglen Arts Foundation, which is based in the village and awards residencies to artists throughout the year. She has visited regularly since 2019, having stepped back from her full-time position as administrator and manager of the Lavit Gallery in Cork, where she continues to work part-time as a senior gallery assistant.
She was just back from a two-week stay in Ballycastle when covid hit in early 2020. “And then the gallery closed,” she says, “so I had all this time in the studio and all this fresh inspiration. I used to have a space at Backwater Studios in Cork, but after we moved to Glounthane in 2012, we knocked the wall between two bedrooms so I could have a studio at home. Obviously, the lockdowns were terrible in many ways, but I did get a lot of work done. There's one painting called Lifting that I think of as my Covid painting because it's got a brighter blue than I’d usually use; I was kind of hanging on to a bit of hope.”
Ita Freeney, Incoming, oil on linen.
Freeney is such a stalwart of the art scene in Cork that one could easily mistake her for a native. In fact, she grew up in Dublin. She comes from a long line of artists; her father Edward is a plein air painter, who worked as a signwriter and designer until his retirement. His contracts included painting full-colour 7-Up and Harp ads on the buses for CIE, and Freeney often worked with him in the summers. It was not unusual to see examples of their work trundling around the city centre.
“We’d paint these big bulletin boards as well,” says Freeney. “Growing up, it was great to have those kinds of experiences. Signwriting was the family trade, but it was just the day job for my father. He’s been showing for years with the Watercolour Society of Ireland and the Dublin Painting & Sketching Club. He brought us to exhibitions from a very young age, and he was always getting us to give our opinions on his paintings. At home, it was always understood that I wanted to go to art college. I was lucky to have had that kind of support.”
Freeney studied at the Crawford College of Art in Cork. There was, she insists, no great plan to get out of Dublin. “It just happened that way,” she says. “And I ended up staying. At college, I studied painting, with photography as a subsidiary. It was all black and white at that stage, and I think that brought something into the paintings because I'm very much interested in tone and composition. But really, it was painting all the way, and I’ve always preferred to work in oils. You get so used to the smell of the paint, and the flow of it. I’ve tried acrylics, but when they harden they have more of a plasticky feel to them. You don’t get that with oils.”
Freeney’s influences include the 19th-century artist James McNeill Whistler, who is celebrated for his depictions of London at night. “I love the mood of his monochrome paintings, and their lightness,” she says. “But then on the other hand I also love Agnes Martin’s resolutely abstract paintings. They're two very different artists, but I like them both.”
Ita Freeney, Winter Water's Edge, oil on board.
Freeney initially set out as an abstract painter. “I would have always been interested in blocks of colour or transitions between one colour and another,” she says. “But then slowly the details started coming into them. I think it was probably when I went down working at the West Cork Art Centre in Skibbereen, after I finished college, that the landscapes started coming into the paintings a little bit, and then just more and more. But the basis of my paintings is still really abstract, even if they have gone more towards representation. It's a contrast, I think, between the two. The paintings are still very much about hard formal shapes. But then they're also about a kind of lyricism, there’s a mood in them as well. So there’s a marriage of both these approaches, I think.”
After Westport, Freeney’s Water’s Edge exhibition will travel to Dublin, where the Paul Kane Gallery has organised a run at the Irish Architectural Archive on Merrion Square in April.
“I’m not sure what I’ll work at next,” she says. “I’m going up to Ballinglen again for two weeks in May. I’ve always been very much a studio painter, I haven’t really done much painting outside, but I wouldn’t mind experimenting with that.”
Ita Freeney, Water’s Edge runs at the Custom House Gallery in Westport, Co Mayo until 3rd March, and the Irish Architectural Archive in Dublin from 18th – 27th April.
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