Morgan O'Driscoll Irish & International Art Auction 21st October 2019

104 74 Hughie O’Donoghue RA (b.1953) Morass Portion (2002) signed, titled and dated 2002 verso oil and photographic element on canvas 116.5 x 149.5cm (46 x 59in) Provenance: Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner €15,000-20,000 (£13,274-17,699) 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. 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. He was long aware that the landscape, especially the vast, boggy expanses of Mayo, can swallow things up, absorbing the dwellings, boundaries, and even the animals. Cars abandoned to corrode and disappear into the earth are a not uncommon aspect of life in rural Ireland. Here the dilapidated saloon car, slowly becoming submerged in the wet land, becomes an emblem of the hopes and dreams of those who once lived and farmed there. Aidan Dunne, September 2019