| Patrick Pye, H.R.H.A. | ||
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Patrick Pye was born of English/Irish parents at Winchester in 1929, the year of the Wall Street crash. His mother, a music teacher, returned to Dublin in 1932; since then Dublin has been his home. He began painting at school under the sculptor Oisin Kelly. He attended the National College of Art in Dublin, and in 1957 won the Mainnie Jellet Scholarship for painting in Ireland. Under this sponsorship he travelled extensively in Europe. It was the prevailing influence of Romanesque Catalan art, seen at the National Museum in Barcelona, that finally turned his attention to Christian iconography. Pye studied stained glass in Maastricht under Albert Troost and has done many windows for churches in Ireland and England. In 1973 he took up etching at the Graphic Studio Dublin where he has continued to work at this medium and so it is fitting that whilst his oils are on show at Jorgensen Fine Art examples of his work in intaglio are to be seen at Graphic Studio Gallery's presentation of 'A Retrospective of Large Etchings from 1977 to 2003', opening on Thursday 16th October and continuing until Saturday 8th November 2003. He has done important commissions for schools, churches and banks. He was elected to Aosdana in 1981 and to the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1991. His publications include Apples & Angels (Veritas, Dublin 1980) and The Time Gatherer (Four Courts Press, Dublin 1991), a study of the sacred theme in the work of El Greco. It would be a mistake, Patrick believes, to burden the artist who paints the Christian story with a didactic intention. The artist is concerned with the experience of life as a whole:he may tell us what it feels like to believe but it is not his prerogative to give a sermon. "We cannot live by bread alone . . .", these words of Christ describe the spiritual truth but they also describe that free and in-between area where the artist labours with the networking of the imagination. There is a delicate area where spiritual truth and human freedom, as the artist understands it, call to each other but the proselytist does damage if the connections he tries to make between the two are too literal. In all religions the world begins with a story. The story, like something mysterious which comes up from the ground, becomes the source of our symbolic life. The story as myth is as a rose is. In his work Patrick reveals to us these ancient and life-enhancing mysteries. |
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