Crawford College of Art & Design

Bridget Flannery graduated from the Crawford College of Art and Design in 1981. Since then she has exhibited throughout Ireland and Europe and her work is in many public and private collections worldwide. Living in Carlow since 1991 she has recently graduated from Carlow College with a B. A. (Hons.) in English and History.

View “Traces III” within the Collection

A Painter of Nature

Flannery is a painter with a considerable track record. While you could, as Brian Fallon once observed, describe her as a landscape painter, it is more accurate to say she is a painter of nature. Her paintings emerge from her engagement with the landscape in the widest sense: the character of place and her experience of it; feelings of belonging or not belonging; memories and reflections.

The paintings develop a visual language that owes much to abstraction. Their nuanced surfaces recall natural textures, atmospheric subtleties, and while they are internally consistent they are not conventionally representational. She builds up nuanced tonalities with collaged layers of paper saturated with pigment. There is a compressed energy to her compositions while her use of colour and texture is always mature and assured.  These paintings are quietly and surely persuasive.-  Aidan Dunne – The Irish Times

“Bridget Flannery can be described as a landscape painter, though it might be more correct to describe her as a painter of Nature in the wider sense. Her pictures obviously have an organic relation with certain specific areas and places, but she makes no attempt to reproduce the surface appearance of things or to evoke purely transient effects of wind, weather and light. . . . She “abstracts” without being an abstractionist. Her forms are often closely akin to natural forms and shapes, but while their genesis may be in the natural world, they are largely autonomous and follow an internal logic of form and colour.” — Brain Fallon