Artist Tadhg McSweeney saw ‘poetry in ordinary things’

 

By Pet O’Connell

Whether depicting a pair of old boots, clothes on a washing line, or the crows outside his window, Tadhg McSweeney’s gift was the ability to “look at the everyday with a new aesthetic”.

Largely self-taught as a painter, McSweeney’s death aged 82 prompted tributes from across the artistic spectrum for a man who described his own work as “seeing poetry in ordinary things”.

A figurative artist working predominantly in oils and watercolour, McSweeney left a vast legacy of paintings, as well as frescoes, woodcuts, etchings, and silk-screen prints.

Artist Mary Jordan, who delivered a eulogy at McSweeney’s funeral in Cill na Martra, Co Cork, said: “His style is very bold. It can be said to be naïve but he frequently captured something that really carries a magic and weight to it.

“His paintings get you to look at everyday life in a new way.

“After seeing his paintings of rows of washing hanging out, you’d suddenly start seeing the beauty in lines of washing.

“Creativity was in every aspect of his everyday life,” she added.

The home he shared with his sister Bríd, until her death two years ago, was filled with his large-scale paintings, dominated by a giant sculpture of a bird.

“His art was in the fabric of their house, and when Máire, his older sister, became ill and was bedridden, he painted the ceiling of her bedroom — a wonderful mural of the fields and birds outside the window that she wasn’t able to go out to anymore,” said Mary.

According to film-maker Dónal Ó Céilleachair, who examined McSweeney’s work in a 2014 documentary, Tadhg McSweeney, artist, his simple style belied a depth of vision.

“He reduces everything to its essence. From a distance, it might seem to fall into that [naïve] category of painting but when you look at it close-up it’s quite complex and he achieves a lot with very few strokes. He’s really a master of that,” Ó Céilleachair said.

“I remember sitting across from his kitchen table one day and we were talking about painting and he just took this jamjar and he said ‘look, this jamjar is only three strokes of a brush’.

“I went to art school in New York for four years and I think I learnt as much about painting from one conversation with Tadhg as I did in four years at art school.”

McSweeney, whose work has been exhibited in galleries from Hamburg to London and San Francisco, may be best remembered for his vignettes of Irish rural life but he was equally inspired by periods living in Dublin and London.

His Dublin home was a former tenement on Henrietta St owned by architect Uinseann MacEoin, who rented rooms to artists of all disciplines, including flute-player Fintan Vallely.

“Tadhg painted prolifically,” Vallely recalled. “He’d go off at 4 or 5 in the morning and walk around the docks and the streets to experience what the streets were like when they were empty.

“He was fascinated by light. Some of his skies are fabulous, his trees and scenery, and the haunting presence of birds.”

Whether urban or rural, the same attention to the seemingly insignificant is ever-present in his work, as McSweeney himself noted: “The seeming banal and trivial is...as valid a subject as the most profound.”