a review by

– Aidan Dunne from The Irish Times –

MICHAEL FLAHERTY

“Michael Flaherty’s ‘Dark Light’ at the Hallward Gallery is appropriately entitled, given that it marks a decisive move away from the bold colours he has previously favoured. His new work is more muted and more tonal generally, though he still relishes strong contrasts, with splashes of vivid yellow, for example.

“He is a landscape painter, and he concentrates on the landscape around him, that is the Cloghane-Brandon area under Mount Brandon and including the valley of the Abhainn Mhor River. What seems to have happened is that his growing knowledge and appreciation of this terrain have deepened his sense of engagement not with place per se but with the structure of the landscape.

“Where the earlier, more colourful paintings were about surface, now there is a sense of layered process, of great stretches of time and slow change.”

Click here to view Michael’s paintings.