Morgan O'Driscoll Irish & International Art Auction 29th April 2019

98 77 Hughie O’Donoghue RA (b.1953) Raft (2007) signed lower right, titled and dated 2007 verso oil and mixed media on board 72 x 122.25cm (28.25 x 48in) Provenance: Private Collection €12,000-€18,000 ($13,483-$20,224) (£10,169-£15,254) For Hughie O’Donoghue painting, and art in general, has been a process of research and excavation. Born in Manchester to Irish parents, he spent his childhood summers in rural Co Mayo with his mother’s family (his father’s family had lived further down the west coast). He became interested not only in his own family history - his father, who worked as a railway clerk and was extremely well read and musical, had served in the British Army during the Second World War - but in the circumstances of that history, how individuals are carried along on currents outside of their control. When he came across an image of one of the so-called bog people, those bronze age individuals whose remains were preserved by the anaerobic quality of dense peat, he realized he had a way to approach painting. Over time, he produced many series of works that delved into his father’s wartime experiences, and his mother’s family background in Mayo. In the meantime, he received a commission to make a series of paintings on The Passion, which he did, on an epic scale. In fact, he has generally sought to work in epic terms: his parents’ lives, his work suggests, are the epic tales of ordinary people, those who fashion the fabric of the world but are generally unsung. In time, he has moved on from the stories of specific individuals to more generally allegorical compositions, in line with his feeling that artists do not ultimately control of define the meanings of their work. Still, a personal involvement persists. He has long used large-scale photographs embedded in the surface of his paintings, initially archival or found images, and then his own staged photographs, often with his own daughter and son as protagonists. His Raft paintings recall Gericault’s celebrated master- piece, the Raft of the Medusa. They are also, though, sadly prophetic, unwittingly anticipating the recent, desperate voyages of refugees and migrants in the Mediterranean. But then, the Raft paintings tell a timeless and universal story. Aidan Dunne, March 2019