Making Faces: Cork artists team up for new exhibition at Lavit
Katherine Boucher Beug and Mags Geaney at the opening of Making Faces at the Lavit Gallery, Cork.
The artists Katherine Boucher Beug and Mags Geaney have much in common, not least their disregard for convention. Making Faces, their new exhibition at the Lavit Gallery in Cork, showcases their shared fascination with the human face, but also the highly individual approach each takes to portraiture.
A native of Princeton, New Jersey, Boucher Beug studied at Northwestern University in Illinois and at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg, Germany before settling in Cork in 1971. She paints landscapes and still lifes, and makes ceramics and assemblages, but began focusing on portraiture during the Covid lockdowns, which she spent at home in Dunderrow, near Kinsale.
“I had no models to work with,” she says, “so I started making paintings based on the drawings in my sketchbooks. I’m always sketching faces, particularly when I’m travelling. My favourite place to sketch is on the subway in New York. I cannot be good company for my husband on holidays.”
Her new portraits were small in size, “which gave me great freedom. I found that working on this scale allowed me to focus on expressions, and I could project my own mood onto the images.”
These days, Boucher Beug is not concerned with painting likenesses, but when she first moved to Cork, she thought she might do so for a living. She set up in the Antique Market on the Mardyke, charging a pound for each portrait she completed. “I was only 24,” she says, “and I don’t know where I found the courage. I’d bring two chairs into the space, and paint whoever turned up. I only did it for six Saturdays, I think, and I can’t remember how many portraits I actually painted. Some were dreadful, and some were okay. Shortly after that, I started teaching, and then I became pregnant with our first child, so I stopped doing it.”
She moved on to painting portraits of the elderly at a home in Kinsale. “It was great practice, as the old people kept very still. And then I got to hear their stories as well, of course, which was fantastic. I had an exhibition of those portraits at the Cork Craftman’s Guild in 1976. I would have shown work in the Lavit Gallery around that time as well.”
In Making Faces, Boucher Beug will show some old work, and some new. Some of her pieces are on paper, and others on canvas. “The paintings on canvas have more of a psychological element to them,” she says. “It’s like I’m still trying to figure things out.”
Geaney recalls that her first encounter with Boucher Beug was when she and her husband Joachim visited Geaney’s studio on Pine St during Cork Art Trail, not long after she’d moved back to Cork after a spell in California. “Katherine bought one of my pieces, and we became great friends,” she says.
Mags Geaney grew up in Cork, where she completed a Masters by Research in Fine Art at the Crawford College of Art & Design in 2010. Her paintings, drawings and works in video are often inspired by photographs of models in fashion magazines. “I know a lot of artists work from life, but that doesn’t interest me at all,” she says.
Geaney has often explored identity in her work. “I was adopted as a child, and I felt like a cuckoo in the nest,” she says. “I had one foot in the family I grew up in, and the other in this imaginary lost family, without fitting into either.”
Geaney was 32 before she met her birth mother, who gave her up when she was ten days old. “It was so bizarre because she actually looked like my adoptive mum. They were both small, blonde and had blue eyes. She was really upset, saying, ‘I’m so sorry, can you forgive me? I tried to keep you.’ I went to hug her. I put my arms around her, and it was miraculous; there was this massive soul connection. They say babies don't remember anything, but I did; I remembered her smell and her voice. As soon as I put my head near her heart, I knew her.”
Geaney’s mother continued to write to her, but when she died this year, in early April, Geaney thought it best to not attend the funeral. Her mother had gone on to marry, and have several more children, none of whom were aware of her existence. “But meeting her changed my life,” she says. “I knew that I was loved and wanted.”
Recent years have been traumatic for Geaney; she was diagnosed with cancer shortly before the Covid pandemic. “I didn’t realise it was in my family, I didn’t have access to my records.”
Around the same time, the lease ran out on the space she worked at Backwater Studios on Wandesford Quay. “It’s really difficult to get a studio in Cork, so I converted a room on the top floor at home. I painted all through my medical treatment. I started an Instagram account, and I’d post a drawing or a painting while I was waiting to go into chemo. Just getting feedback from other artists reminded me: I’m here, I’m alive, I’m painting.”
Geaney remembers how, in the early days of her treatment, “being an artist became my everything. At one point, the chemo I was on was very strong. I actually lost the use of my hands, and I remember crying to the oncologist, saying, I have to paint.”
Thankfully, she is well again, and painting all the time.
- Making Faces runs at the Lavit Gallery, Cork, until June 8. Katherine Boucher Beug and Mags Geaney are in conversation with curator Brian Mac Domhnaill at 12pm, Saturday, May 25. Further information: lavitgallery.com
