Meet The Artist
Colleen Fitzpatrick
I am an Irish visual artist working on the West coast of Ireland. Although I always loved art, when I was younger I didn’t see it as a real career choice, so on leaving school I studied at University College Dublin, graduating with a Master’s Degree in psychology. I travelled before settling down to a “real” job in social work in New York. The Celtic Tiger brought me back to Dublin, where I worked with early school-leavers and the homeless.
The rugged beauty of Mayo called me back, and I later returned to live on the edge of Connemara. I went back into social work but over the years, due to the stress, I did various courses to change my career. In 2004, I finally went back to study for a degree in Fine Art at the Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology. This took 6 years part-time, during which time I also completed my training in Nutritional Therapy and Yoga Teacher Training. I was happy to sell paintings but made little effort to do so, feeling I had to make money elsewhere.
I left social work and set up a holistic health clinic, taught yoga in the evenings and baked for a local health food shop. I did this for a number of years before the recession hit, around the same time we adopted our daughter from Ethiopia and my focus turned again to art, but this time I wanted to find out why art was so important so I began a PhD in the Philosophy of Art & Culture at the NUI Galway, which I completed in 2016.
My doctoral research focused on painting from a phenomenological viewpoint and its relationship to mindfulness. I tutored in the Philosophy Department at NUIG for 2 years and endeavoured to bring theory into practice. I believe that academia, art and psychology are interrelated and all involve probing, discovery and connectedness. In recent years, however, my focus is more and more on my own practice.
I realise life is short, and it is important to put your energies into what you truly love. I know now that being an artist is a real career choice and I won’t be doing any more training to change my career, this is it for me, my true love and passion.
About My Art
My paintings blend abstract and figurative, bordering on magical realism and expressionism, evoking an atmosphere rather than an actual place. Recurring themes are the vastness of nature and our place in the world.
My art is about interconnectedness and a sense of belonging to the universal, where we are in partnership with every other aspect of the natural world. Although my identity as an Irish person is strong, I am first and foremost a human being trying to make sense of a larger world, like everyone else. The skies in the West of Ireland are a constant source of awe for me, and the fact that it rains so much draws me to bright colours and the sun.
The sun and the moon are important symbols in my art, reminding me of the awe-inspiring wonder of the natural world and environmental issues. I also include other symbols of nature, like birds, fish, dragon flies, flowers. This is a personal thing for me, which connects me to the natural environment in my heart when I paint. I usually add a human presence, dwarfed in comparison to the natural world: this is a nod to how small we in the grand scheme of things.
There is more than one layer to my paintings, the environment and our place in it is a serious issue but at the same time, my paintings are full of hope because our world is beautiful and it is not too late for all of us to become conscious of this.
Art is a place where we can go to discover possibilities, find freedom to imagine and refresh our perspective.
I alternate between techniques I enjoy. Sometimes my paintings are fluid where I use thinners, revealing unpredictable results and working intuitively. In other moments, I am drawn to stillness or detail. I love mixing media, including acrylic, oil, alcohol ink and the joy and sparkle of gold leaf, with its echoes of the sun. My palette tends to be the common thread among my paintings. I am currently very drawn to blues - turquoise, teal - and hot pinks which are grounded in neutral colours.
