MARY LOHAN — Shoreline

essay by Mark Lawlor

ISBN 978 0946846 719    40 pages (paperback)    23x30cm   25  illus

This wide-format book conveys the lustrous beauty of Mary Lohan’s paintings in all their tactile glory. Her horizontals of sky, sea and land are not clearly defined, creating a rhythm and motion that perfectly capture Ireland’s coastal regions. Lohan’s very particular use of paint, the sense of movement in her work, and the atmospheric nature of her paintings all combine to make her one of Ireland’s most eagerly collected painters.

EXTRACT

"Arriving at the studio, climbing up stairs, unlocking and locking doors. Adjustment for the flood of natural light coming through the windows, flitting off pigeon-coloured floorboards, and creating possibilities of new space. The life of the painter resumes. A radio is switched on. The painter holds her hand up to the light as she puts on gloves. These transparent skins are non-porous. They keep the toxic pigment locked out – endosmosis does not take place. An old pigment-mottled shirt is worn. The painter looks like a surgeon as she lays the canvasses out on a bench, horizontally. With the same care, she checks on her blade, rags and implements. She bends over the bench as if looking at a body. She takes a rag and slowly makes clarification of something. This act of attrition she repeats many times. The painter’s look of utter concentration is the sound of the blade on canvas. She pauses, eyes her work, meantime her left hand is cleaning the knife with a cloth. She picks up a brush, the left hand does the same action. She mixes pigments beside a mass of squashed silver tubes that smell, and give the room its tainture. This, to an untrained eye, looks filthy. It seems as though the painter is worrying, with a spatula, a lump of gley. She uses linseed oil to make the pigment rheumy. Meanings for ‘shore’ fluctuate, a no-woman’s-land at water edge where filth is deposited for the tide to wash away."

— from the essay by Mark Lawlor