Brat Bhríde welcomes you to this festival which celebrates Brigid of Faughart and the Celtic festival of Imbolc in myth, landscape, folklore, spiritual customs, music poetry and dance. The emphasis of this festival is to revisit and reclaim the richness of the traditions associated with Brigid of Faughart, in ways which are relevant to our lives in the 21^st century.

The festival runs from 27 Jan. 2010 to 1 Feb. 2010. Further details are available by downloading the programme here or visiting the website www.bratbhride.com.

The lectures and workshops will offer opportunities

• for expanding and deepening our knowledge of Brigid
• for tasting the Wisdom that she was and still  is
• For integrating Feminine Consciousness more surely to contemporary culture.

The music and the time honoured rituals associated with Brigid and Imbolc will nourish our hearts and souls, and give us confidence in these uncertain times.

Brat Bhríde (Maura Lennon, Mairéad Heaney, Dolores Whelan, MariAnne Gosling, Maura Matthews, Catherine Pepper and Noreen Townsend ) is a voluntary group who have come together to organise this  event.

The festival is supported by County Louth Tourism; Louth Heritage; Create Louth;  Louth County Library; An Tain Theatre  and DKIT.

An announcement has been posted on the Europe Direct website.

AIDAN DUNNE

Tue, Jan 05, 2010

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/features/2010/0105/1224261662900.html

Drogheda’s Nano Reid and Belfast-born Gerard Dillon became close friends and often painted together – and while you are unlikely to mistake the work of one for the other, there is common ground between them, as a new exhibition shows

AN EXHIBITION at the Highlanes Gallery in Drogheda, Co Louth, explores the relationship between Nano Reid and Gerard Dillon, each of whom played an important role in the development of modernism in 20th-century Irish art. Did their personal friendship translate into shared artistic aims and approaches? While it is displayed side by side, you are unlikely to mistake the work of one for the other, but at the same time it’s no surprise that there might be common ground: they were on close terms for several decades, had shared interests, and often spent time and painted together.

Reid is now indelibly associated with Drogheda, though during her lifetime it pained her that her birthplace did not accord her the artistic recognition she deserved. In fact, the local populace, she complained, had little interest in painting at all. She had harsh and not entirely unfounded views on the shortcomings of the municipality, and bemoaned what she saw as the destruction of the town’s historical fabric. She was born in 1900 – she did not like to be pinned down about her birth date, which is often given as 1905 or later, but, in his carefully detailed biography of her, Declan Mallon plumps for 1900.

HER FATHER WAS a publican, and the family was comfortably off. In 1921 she became a student at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art, at first commuting daily but then basing herself in the capital. Fairly small in stature, she comes across, in various descriptions, as being shy and reticent but also feisty, with forthright views and a waspish tongue. She went on to study in Paris and then, dissatisfied, at the Central School of Art and the Chelsea Polytechnic in London. She settled back in Dublin, and at one stage the flat she shared with a friend became the centre for an odd, bohemian group of younger figures, including Pearse Hutchinson. Her plan to become a portrait painter foundered, not for lack of ability but through temperamental unsuitability. Flattery and diplomacy were not her strong points. She nonetheless established herself as a highly regarded painter on the progressive side of Irish art.

Her eventual artistic voice is distinctive and makes no attempt to be ingratiating. She draws on post-impressionism and expressionism, but doesn’t hesitate to bring in aspects of cubism at will, and she has her own subdued – at times murky – palette. Apparently a visit to a show by Belgian painter Marie Howet in 1937 encouraged her own boldly linear, highly subjective mode of representation. The dreamy, indeterminate space that is characteristic of many of both her and Dillon’s paintings strongly recalls Marc Chagall.

DILLON, BORN IN Belfast in 1917, was the son of a postman. He apprenticed as a painter and decorator, and pursued that occupation (and later on others in the building trade) in London for many years throughout his working life. He was a restlessly inventive and industrious artist. While he was on a visit to Belfast in 1939, the outbreak of war prevented his return to London, and he headed south to Dublin instead, one of a number of Northern Irish artists to do so. At some stage he met Reid, and thus began a long, mutually beneficial association.

Hilda van Stockum, a fellow student of hers at the Metropolitan School, said that it was her feeling that Reid would like to be more attractive to men than seemed to be the case. She was certainly wary of men, and warned van Stockum against them. Was she initially attracted to Dillon, and did that attraction become, in time, friendship? Or was he a safe prospect as a male friend because he was gay? In any case, their friendship thrived.

To a greater extent than Reid, Dillon worked his way through a gamut of stylistic and technical possibilities in his paintings, very much in the manner of an autodidact. As with Reid, he didn’t have great natural facility as a draughtsman or a painter, but there is a tremendous vitality to his work, and a continual openness to possibility that makes it engaging. He drew equally, for example, on the pictorial method of the ancient high-cross carvers and the Parisian avant-garde. He was inclined towards folksy, even sentimental narratives, which can make some of his paintings seem either especially accessible or unduly cloying, depending on your point of view.

Like many Irish artists, including Reid, he was particularly drawn to the west of Ireland, and around 1950 managed to spend a year in Connemara, based in a cottage on Inishlacken, close to Roundstone.

Reid went to stay with him, as she did on other occasions, and he with her. Dillon valued the west of Ireland rather nostalgically, as a bastion of folk traditions as yet spared the creeping uniformity of modernisation. In his work, the landscape is always a backdrop to the lives, customs and traditions of the people, not an end in itself.

Reid drew a huge fund of inspiration from her birthplace and its surroundings, notably the Boyne Valley which, as Seán O’Faoláin put it, “silently murmurs ancestral memories”. A series of spare, linear ink drawings of sites along the valley, accompanied by a text by Elizabeth Hickey, was published as a book, I Send My Love Along the Boyne, in 1966. The style of the drawings, and indeed Reid’s paintings, echoes the linear patterning of Celtic and early Christian art. Judging by her paintings, she liked the dense, jumbled textures generated in the landscape by the designs and accidents of history, all mingled with the unruly present, and generations of stories told about places and people. She wasn’t so keen on digging up and reorganising the past, and said she’d given up painting the Boyne Valley after the excavations of the 1960s. Dillon went to stay with her in Drogheda and, with one of her sisters as chauffeur, they’d make painting excursions into the countryside.

DILLON DIED AT a relatively young age in 1971, having settled in Dublin in 1968. Living back in Drogheda from the early 1960s, Reid survived him by 10 years, but she was increasingly prone to arthritis and other ailments as time went by. The works in the Highlanes exhibition, curated by Dr Riann Coulter, offer an exposition of their decades-long artistic conversation. Each acknowledged the other’s influence, and the show is a perfect way of tracing the surprisingly subtle workings of that influence, and also of placing each within the broader historical context. Reid would surely have been proud of it, and no doubt gratified to be acknowledged so conspicuously in her hometown.

© 2010 The Irish Times

Sunday 3 January, 2.30pm- 4.00pm
€3.00 for children
parentsand guardians are welcome to support and participate
This gallery and Studio – based workshop is led by Liam O’Broin using the Nano Reid and Gerard Dillon exhibition as a starting point.

Tuesday 5 January, 2.00pm- 3.30pm
€5.00for children (5 – 8yrs) Bookings advisable parents and guardians are welcome to support and participate
Join artist Liam O’Broin who will discuss the work of Nano Reid and Gerard Dillon with family groups, discussing ideas and themes in the exhibition. Families are then invited to use dry materials and paper(supplied) making work in response to the exhibition.

Wednesday 6 January, 11.00am- 12.00pm
€3.00 for children ( free with admission to exhibition with adults)
Thisgallery and Studio – based workshop is led by Liam O’Broin using the Nano Reid and Gerard Dillon exhibition as a starting point.

Wednesday 6 January, 2.00pm- 4.30pm
€5.00 for children (9 – 13yrs) Bookings advisable
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AdultWorkshop
This adult workshop is led by Liam O’Broin. Liam will bring the group around the Nano Reid and Gerard Dillon exhibition, focusing on the tapestry work by Gerard Dillon Hands Across the Border.

Friday 8 January, 11.00am- 1.00pm
€10.00 per adult (places limited) Bookings advisable
Exhibition Sponsors: the Arts Council, lJons Engineering, Trousdale Baking Company, FBD Insurance, Keal Ryan Properties and Whyte’s Art Auctionners and Valuers
Admission: €4.00
Concessions: €3.00 (concessions-friends/patrons/benefactors,older people, unwaged etc)
Free for children (under18’s)
There is a €2.00 admission for under 18’s visiting as part of a group or special programme
For further informationand booking contactSiobhan Murphy and Hilary Kelly at Highlanes Gallery on 041-9803311 or Regina Sommerville at info@highlanes.ie
Opening Hours: Monday-Saturday 10.30am-5.00pm Sunday and Bank Holidays 12.00-5.00pm

Large and small canvases, watercolors and prints at prices to suit everybody’s budget (£60-320)

Welcome up to browse and have a coffee or something nice to eat in this lovely cafe & gallery!

The exhibition will be up until the 15th of January 2010
Opening hours Mon-Fri 8.15-6.00, Sat 9.30-5.30, Sun 10.00-5.30
(If you’re driving come early in the day to avoid traffic!)

In conjunction with the event an exhibition of recent work by Thomas Ryan and Padraig Lynch will take place from Wednesday 18th November to Friday 20th November in The Malone Room, Ardee, Co.Louth.

All welcome.

5th November – 27th November 2009

Opening Night 5th November 7pm -9pm

Open Mon – Fri  10am -1pm & 1:30pm- 5pm

Basement Gallery,Town Hall, Dundalk, Co.Louth

042-9392916

Basement Gallery is proud to present the work of Dundalk-based graffiti artists Kube and Omin. Painting commercially and as a passionate hobby, Kube and Omin have been painting the countries walls for the past 13 years, bringing graffiti art to their hometown and nationwide, as well as being established on the international scene.

Using a wide range of media, including spray painted canvas, acrylic and oil paintings, photographic pieces, steel etching prints and sketches to fully showcase the vibrancy, movement and technical skill that comes with this very new and rapidly moving art form.

Kube and Omin have painted for a vast array of major companies, brands, festivals and arts organisations. Working commercially doing commissions and brand promotion the pair have been submitting their artwork to internationally circulated magazines for the past 10 years, gaining them work overseas aswell as representing the Irish Graffiti art scene on an worldwide platform.

Graffiti art by its very nature is something that the public see and admire but yet mystery surrounds the rhyme and reason to why and how it is done. Since its beginings in the 70’s, Graffiti art has been a voice for young artists to display their talents on a public stage without reward, whilst risking prosecution in some cases to express themselves.

Using such a wide range of mediums – Kube and Omin hope to visually demonstrate the essence of Graffiti art through their own styles and skills. From sketches used on past murals, to photographs of walls, to graffiti art on canvas – all facets of the artform will be displayed and will give a visual narrative to their 13 years of non-stop graffiti art exploits.

This is the first show of its kind to be held in Dundalks’ basement gallery and promises to be one of most animated and interesting uses of the space to date.  Kube and Omin will be displaying unseen original pieces for this show in addition to painting some of the gallery walls and creating a more unique, open and engaging atmosphere to the space.

This show promises to be fresh on every surface.