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Eamonn Carter
Please find below some samples of Eamonn Carter's work. A brief description about the artist can be found to the right. Click on an image below for details.
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About the artist:
Eamonn Carter was born in Gorey, Co. Wexford. He studied at Waterford Regional College before attending Crawford College of Art, Cork. Eamonn was a founder member of the Gorey Artists Foundation and the Gorey School of Art.
Since 1984 he has contributed to exhibitions in the RHA as well as in several Dublin galleries. In Febuary 2007 he was Artist in Residence at Cill Rialaig Co. Kerry.
In May 2006 he held a solo exhibition at the Leinster Gallery entitled Prairie Series 2004-2006. The following is an extract from the exhibition catalogue written by Michael Warren.
"Eamonn Carter’s subject matter during the recent past has focused on the life and culture of the North American Indian especially those of the Choctaw, Apache and Sioux tribes.
The present body of work might appear on first impression to be a continuation with the same fascination, and on a certain level, it is. Notable changes can however be immediately detected: these paintings have a more raw, more urgent feel. There is evidence of an emergence of a deeper, mature expression. The previous flamboyant brush marks that in part at least celebrated and echoed the exotic (ghost dance series), here have become short, straight jabs, slips and slashes. The frame has been definitively abandoned allowing the imagery to extend beyond the limitation of the board on which it is depicted, to a 3-dimensional vastness of the mind’s eye.
The recurring image is that of an open prairie, grazing land of the buffalo. The paintings bear witness to the buffalo in its natural habitat, a symbol of unsullied natural harmony. But this image of harmony is one that everyone knows no longer exists. The violation of this utopian co-existence of animal and environment, is implicit throughout the work in this exhibition: and it is explicit in Carter’s forceful triptych in which the fore legs of the mighty buffalo appear to have been undermined, tripped. They have buckled and thrown the beast’s head forward in a death-fall. A confused, glazed eye meets our gaze in a last moment of life. It is a death of innocence. There is neither blame nor accusation. The artist does not point to causes for this pulling down of the noble beast.
Carter deliberately concentrates our empathy to a precise state of being, namely of loss Pieta. The specific becomes universal, as humans we feel the fragility and vulnerability of our humanity."
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