YOUNG ARTIST WORKED IN KILDARE BARN

LEINSTER LEADER 11 August 1973

Young artist worked in Kildare barn

Opened recently in the Project Art Centre, South King St. Dublin, was an exhibition of paintings of Ian Sutherland, a young artist who has competed many of his extraordinary canvases in Co. Kildare.

Son of a Scots father and Donegal mother, 28-year-old Ian is much travelled. Born in Donegal his parents took him to the Argentine as a child where he became passionately interested in old Peruvian and Inca art. He attended art school in Lima before coming back to Ireland to be educated in Enniskillen and Trinity. A year of formal education in Trinity convinced him that his future lay in art, and he returned to Peru where he won a grant which gave him three years of study in the Hammersmith and Central School of Art, London. Two years ago, he exhibited a painting, Bien Helada, in the Paris Salon de Realties, Nouveles.

Family ties brought him back to Ireland. An aunt is Lucy O’Brien, the artist in stained glass who did the magnificent high altar window in Athlone Cathedral. She is descended from the patriot, William O’Brien, who was transported to Tasmania.

A great walker – he walked the 50 miles from London to Cambridge in 17 hours – Ian Sutherland tramped around Connemara before coming to County Kildare. He is the guest of Mrs. G.P.A. Hickson, wife of an extensive farmer in Haggard, Carbury and herself an artist who studied under Mam’e Jellett and is a friend of Evie Hope.

Ian’s studio is a large room in the upper storey of a row of barns and outhouses. In this peaceful, rural farm he has completed works which are the very essence of 20th Century art, one might say. He paints his pictures in small squares, each covered over until he completes the preceding one. Each of his dozen or more paintings represents up to 20 hours work, mostly executed at night and into the early morning hours.

Says the young artist; “I am trying to paint life as it is now and each painting is related to some part of the modern phenomena – modern music by the Rolling Stones, advertising in all its garnishes, scribbling on walls, children singing, modern machinery…”

When the exhibition is over Ian plans to walk the 376 miles from Mizzen Head to Malen Head and hopes to do it in 8 days.

Re-typed by Mary Murphy