Terence Philip Flanagan
PPRUA HRUA RHA MBE (15 August 1929 – 22 February 2011) was a landscape painter and teacher from
Northern Ireland
Northern Ireland ( ga, Tuaisceart Éireann ; sco, label= Ulster-Scots, Norlin Airlann) is a part of the United Kingdom, situated in the north-east of the island of Ireland, that is variously described as a country, province or region. Nort ...
.
Early life
Terry Flanagan was born on 15 August 1929 in
Enniskillen
Enniskillen ( , from ga, Inis Ceithleann , 'Cethlenn, Ceithlenn's island') is the largest town in County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland. It is in the middle of the county, between the Upper and Lower sections of Lough Erne. It had a population of ...
,
County Fermanagh
County Fermanagh ( ; ) is one of the thirty-two counties of Ireland, one of the nine counties of Ulster and one of the six counties of Northern Ireland.
The county covers an area of 1,691 km2 (653 sq mi) and has a population of 61,805 a ...
. He was the eldest of seven children, whom were raised by two aunts after their mother died at a young age.
Flanagan received a general education from the
Presentation Brothers at
St Michael's College, Enniskillen
St Michael's College (Irish: ''Coláiste Mhíchíl'') is a Roman Catholic boys' grammar school located in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland.
Named for St Michael the Archangel, the school educates boys in County Fermanagh and the surrounding area ...
between the years 1943 to 1949.
Flanagan took up painting in his teens and learned the art of watercolour painting from the local portraitist and landscape artist
Kathleen Bridle in night classes at
Enniskillen Technical College.
He attended
Belfast College of Art
The Belfast School of Art, is a School in thUlster University Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciencesand is physically located at the Belfast campus. Following the results of the Research Excellence Framework 2014 Ulster is ranked within ...
from 1949 until 1953 studying under
Romeo Toogood
Romeo Toogood ''ARCA'' ''HRUA'' (6 May 1902- 11 August 1966) was an Ulster artist and teacher who specialized in landscape painting.
Early life
Romeo Charles Toogood was born in Belfast on 6 May 1902. He was the son of a stone-carver, Charles ...
,
John Luke John Luke may refer to:
* John A. Luke Jr., chief executive officer of MeadWestvaco
* John Luke (artist) (1906–1975), Irish artist
* John Luke (New Zealand politician) (1858–1931), New Zealand politician
* John Luke (MP) (1563–1638), English p ...
and
Tom Carr.
After his graduation, Flanagan taught at the Convent of the Sacred Heart of Mary in
Lisburn
Lisburn (; ) is a city in Northern Ireland. It is southwest of Belfast city centre, on the River Lagan, which forms the boundary between County Antrim and County Down. First laid out in the 17th century by English and Welsh settlers, with ...
and the
Assumption Convent in
Ballynahinch, County Down,
before obtaining a full-time post at
St. Mary's College of Education in 1955 where he stayed for 29 years until his retirement in 1984.
He became Head of Art at St. Mary's in 1965.
In 1959, Flanagan married actress
Sheelagh Garvan of the
Lyric Players.
Career
Flanagan showed one oil painting ''Deirdre'' at the 1953 Oireachtas Exhibition in Dublin but waited until 1969 to contribute another, ''Inbhear''. He exhibited regularly at Oireachtas throughout the 1970s and beyond. Flanagan was later awarded the Oireachtas painting prize in 1974.
Flanagan joined Wilfred Stewart and Lewis Logan for a three-man show at Belfast's CEMA Gallery in February 1954 when he exhibited a number of works including ''Twilight, Howard Street'' which he showed three months later at the Ulster Arts Club. In 1954, Flanagan also participated in his first annual
Royal Ulster Academy of Arts exhibition, showing three works, two flower paintings and one landscape.
He contributed two works to the annual exhibitions in both 1955 and 1956.
The Committee for the Encouragement of Music and Art gave Flanagan his first one-man show hosted by the Piccolo Gallery, Belfast in November 1958.
By the 1960s, Flanagan had carved out a successful and parallel career as an artist, and his family became close to poet Seamus Heaney's family. Flanagan painted ''Boglands (for Seamus Heaney)'' in 1967 which formed part of his ''Gortahork Series''. Heaney reciprocated in writing ''Bogland: for TP Flanagan'' published in the collection entitled ''Door into the Dark'' of 1969.
Seamus Heaney
Seamus Justin Heaney (; 13 April 1939 – 30 August 2013) was an Irish poet, playwright and translator. He received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. , for whom he painted various pieces, described Flanagan as being in tune "with the notion of an earthly paradise and hence the radiance of the painting is entirely this-worldly...and always there has been that necessary painterly hedonism".
In 1960, Flanagan was appointed one of seven trustees of the newly formed Lyric Players Trust including
Deborah Brown
Deborah Brown (27 September 1927 – 8 April 2023) was a Northern Irish sculptor. She is well known in Ireland for her pioneering exploration of the medium of fibre glass in the 1960s and established herself as one of the country's leading scu ...
and
John Hewitt, a position he was to hold for five years. That same year he displayed his work at the new CEMA Gallery. An invited artist, he showed alongside several others including
Colin Middleton
Colin Middleton (29 January 1910 – 23 December 1983) was a Northern Irish landscape artist, figure painter, and surrealist. Middleton's prolific output in an eclectic variety of modernist styles is characterised by an intense inner visio ...
, Deborah Brown,
Gerard Dillon
Gerard Dillon (191614 June 1971) was an Irish painter and artist.
Life
Dillon was born in Belfast, he left school at the age of fourteen and for seven years worked as a painter and decorator, mostly in London. From an early age he was intere ...
and
William Conor
William Conor OBE RHA PPRUA ROI (1881–1968) was a Belfast-born artist.
Celebrated for his warm and sympathetic portrayals of working-class life in Ulster, William Conor studied at the Government School of Design in Belfast in the 1890s ...
, at the inaugural exhibition in the gallery designed by the architect
Robert McKinstry. In 1961, Flanagan was patronised with a one-man show at CEMA's Chicester Street Gallery of which the Belfast Telegraph's Kenneth Jamison writes:
"Light is the artist's theme, its flux rain-filtered over moist fields, spilling an irregular pattern on low lough-side hills, mirrored again from the still lough's face...Always one is conscious of the infinite subtle modulations of light and colour. He does not refine forms. Rather he simplifies in terms of light and paint to reveal the sheer mood and poetry of the experience; but there is nothing casual about the structure of his pictures."
Flanagan produced the set for the Lyric's production of
JM Synge's ''Deirdre of the Sorrows'' in 1963. Flanagan had a one-man exhibition at the Richie Hendricks Gallery in Dublin and showed two works at the Irish Exhibition of Living Art's twenty-fifth anniversary show in 1964. He showed in the ''Four Ulster Painters'' exhibition at the
Arnolfini Gallery
Arnolfini is an international arts centre and gallery in Bristol, England. It has a programme of contemporary art exhibitions, artist's performance, music and dance events, poetry and book readings, talks, lectures and cinema. There is also a ...
in Bristol in 1964.
Deborah Brown invited Flanagan on to the committee to oversee an arts bursary scheme set-up in memory of patron of the arts,
Alice Berger-Hammerschlag in 1970 which aided many younger artists to travel and to purchase equipment and materials.
The Arts Council of Northern Ireland's gallery was the venue for Flanagan's 1966 solo exhibition. In 1968, Flanagan's work travelled to John Hewitt's
Herbert Art Gallery
Herbert Art Gallery & Museum (also known as the Herbert) is a museum, art gallery, records archive, learning centre, media studio and creative arts facility on Jordan Well, Coventry, England.
Overview
The museum is named after Sir Alfred Herb ...
for a joint show where he exhibited with Colin Middleton. Flanagan donated a picture to an exhibition to raise funds for victims of civil disturbances in Belfast in the autumn of 1969. The exhibition at Queen's University was organised by his wife, and showed work from thirty artists, including Deborah Brown,
Cherith McKinstry
Cherith McKinstry (4 March 1928 -October 2004) was an Irish painter and sculptor.
Biography
Cherith Boyd was born in Powick, Worcestershire to Lilian Goodwin, a nurse, and Arthur Boyd a psychiatric doctor. She was the middle child of three gi ...
,
William Scott and
F E McWilliam.
In 1971, his work was included in the international exhibition, ROSC: ''The Irish Imagination'' in Dublin. Kathleen Bridle was reunited with her two most famous students in 1973 when the Arts Council of Northern Ireland staged a touring exhibition of her works alongside Flanagan and William Scott.
The wife of the Northern Irish Secretary of State Colleen Rees was the curator of a personal selection of works from Ulster Artists hosted at the Leeds Playhouse Gallery in 1976. Flanagan's work was among 49 works from various artists where he was displayed alongside
Raymond Piper
Raymond Piper ''HRUA HRHA MUniv'' (4 April 1923 – 13 July 2007)Anon: Irish Times 21 July 2007 p16 was British a botanist and an artist.Hackney, P. 2007. Obituary. ''Irish Naturalists' Journal.'' 28: 393-394
Early life
Raymond Piper was born ...
,
Carolyn Mulholland
Carolyn Mulholland '' HRHA'', ''HRUA'' (born 1944) is an Irish sculptor.
Life
Carolyn Mulholland was born in 1944 in Lurgan, County Armagh. She attended the Belfast College of Art, and in 1965 was awarded the Ulster Arts Club prize for sculp ...
, Joe McWilliams, Mercy Hunter,
Tom Carr and many others. In 1977, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland held a solo exhibition of his work from 1967 to 1977.
Flanagan was part of a consortium of forty well-known Ulster names who attempted to win the Independent Television franchise for Northern Ireland in 1979. He became an Associate of the
Royal Hibernian Academy
The Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) is an artist-based and artist-oriented institution in Ireland, founded in Dublin in 1823. Like many other Irish institutions, such as the RIA, the academy retained the word "Royal" after most of Ireland became in ...
in 1983. In 1984, the National Self-Portrait Gallery purchased a Flanagan self-portrait alongside fellow Northerners Brian Ballard, Brian Ferran and F E McWilliam.
Flanagan was resident artist at Sligo Art Gallery for the duration of the 1991 Yeat's Summer School. His exhibition was based on thirty works created and inspired by the Sligo landscape where he had spent considerable time in his childhood. The collection spanned most of his career beginning with those created in the 1960s.
The Ulster Museum hosted a major retrospective covering fifty years of Flanagan's work in 1995. The catalogue contained a foreword written by Seamus Heaney and a critical essay by Curator of Art at the Ulster Museum, Brian Kennedy. Shortly thereafter Flanagan accepted an invite to present a retrospective at the Stadsmuseum Gothenburg, Sweden.
In 2000, Flanagan returned to the Sligo Art Gallery to present a joint exhibition of works with his daughter Catherine and son Philip. In the year before his death Flanagan showed at the Ormeau Baths Gallery where he exhibited works relating to the Troubles.
Although he exhibited widely Flanagan was represented for many years by the
Tom Caldwell
Tom Caldwell (30 June 1921 – 13 November 2002) was a politician, art dealer and interior designer in Northern Ireland.
Born in Uganda, Caldwell moved to Belfast at the age of three. He studied at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, then i ...
Gallery in Belfast and by the David Hendriks Gallery in Dublin.
In later years Flanagan was represented by the Taylor Gallery in Dublin.
Commissions
William Keith, director of the Wellington Tank Company, commissioned Flanagan and three of his Ulster contemporaries,
Basil Blackshaw
Basil Joseph Blackshaw ''HRUA, HRHA'' (July 1932 – 2 May 2016) was a Northern Irish artist specialising in animal paintings, portraits and landscapes and an Academician of the Royal Ulster Academy.
Early life and education
Born in Glengormley, C ...
,
Charles McAuley and James McIntyre to paint one picture each to be donated to the geriatric ward at
Belfast City Hospital, who had cared for his dying father just a few months earlier.
The 1970s saw Flanagan complete a number of prestigious commissions including one to produce a design commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the formation of the Northern Irish state, ''Ulster '71,'' in 1970''.'' He received a further commission from the ''Ulster '71 Festival'' committee in the following year when he produced a mural in County Fermanagh.
The
Arts Council of Northern Ireland funded a Flanagan portrait of Belfast feminist, trade-unionist and peace activist
Saidie Patterson in 1975.
In 1977, Flanagan completed a line-drawing portrait for
Gael Linn
Gael Linn (, "Gael-with-us") is a non-profit and non-governmental organisation focused on the promotion of the Irish language and the arts. The organisation's funding includes government and lottery sources.
History
Gael Linn was founded in Ma ...
's eponymous double LP by Donegal fiddler
John Doherty which was released a year later.
Flanagan contributed to ''The Great Book of Ireland/Leabhar Mór na hÉireann'', commissioned and edited by Theo Dorgan and Gene Lambert. The hand-drawn volume on vellum contained works by 143 poets, 121 artists, 9 composers and 1 calligrapher. It was displayed at the
Irish Museum of Modern Art
The Irish Museum of Modern Art ( ga, Áras Nua-Ealaíne na hÉireann) also known as IMMA, is Ireland's leading national institution for the collection and presentation of modern and contemporary art. Located in Kilmainham, Dublin, the Museum pr ...
at Kilmainham for three months in 1991.
The BBC commissioned him to make a film about his painting practise entitled ''The Painted Landscape'', in 1999.
Awards
*
Royal Ulster Academy: In 1960, Flanagan was elected as an Associate of the Royal Ulster Academy of Arts. A mere four years later he was elected an Honorary Academician of the same institution. He was elected President of the RUA in 1978 when he replaced the previous incumbent
Mercy Hunter
Mercy Hunter ''HRUA PPRUA ARCA MBE'' (22 January 1910 – 20 July 1989) was a Northern Irish artist, calligrapher and teacher. Hunter was a founding member of the Ulster Society of Women Artists, where she was later to become president and she w ...
, and was re-elected in three subsequent years.
Flanagan was the recipient of the Royal Ulster Academy Gold Medal at the 95th Annual show in 1976 for ''Study of Castlecoole, Theme'' described by critic Elizabeth Baird as "a typical Flanagan landscape with subtle, blurred colours and soft light".
*
Royal Hibernian Academy
The Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) is an artist-based and artist-oriented institution in Ireland, founded in Dublin in 1823. Like many other Irish institutions, such as the RIA, the academy retained the word "Royal" after most of Ireland became in ...
: Flanagan was elected a member in 1983.
*
University of Ulster
sco, Ulstèr Universitie
, image = Ulster University coat of arms.png
, caption =
, motto_lang =
, mottoeng =
, latin_name = Universitas Ulidiae
, established = 1865 – Magee College 1953 - Magee Un ...
: Flanagan became only the second ever recipient of the honorary degree of Doctor of Fine Art when he received the accolade from the
University of Ulster
sco, Ulstèr Universitie
, image = Ulster University coat of arms.png
, caption =
, motto_lang =
, mottoeng =
, latin_name = Universitas Ulidiae
, established = 1865 – Magee College 1953 - Magee Un ...
in 2010. It was conferred at a special ceremony hosted in the Arts Council of Northern Ireland's
Ormeau Baths Gallery
The Ormeau Baths in Belfast, Northern Ireland, now a home to tech and digital businesses in a modern contemporary building, was one of Ireland's premier contemporary art spaces. It curated exhibitions by prominent international artists includin ...
, and was awarded in recognition of his outstanding services to art. Flanagan received an MBE in 2011 for his "services to art internationally".
Death and legacy
Flanagan died in
Belfast
Belfast ( , ; from ga, Béal Feirste , meaning 'mouth of the sand-bank ford') is the capital and largest city of Northern Ireland, standing on the banks of the River Lagan on the east coast. It is the 12th-largest city in the United Kingdo ...
on 22 February 2011, aged 82.
His works are in public and private collections including the
Ulster Museum
The Ulster Museum, located in the Botanic Gardens in Belfast, has around 8,000 square metres (90,000 sq. ft.) of public display space, featuring material from the collections of fine art and applied art, archaeology, ethnography, treasure ...
, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, the
Hugh Lane Gallery
The Hugh Lane Gallery, officially Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane and originally the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, is an art museum operated by Dublin City Council and its subsidiary, the Hugh Lane Gallery Trust. It is in Charlemont House ( ...
,
the National Self-Portrait Collection of Ireland
The National Self-Portrait Collection of Ireland is a collection of more than 400 self-portraits of Irish artists which is housed in the Kneafsey Gallery at the University of Limerick.
The origins of the collection can be found in the purchase of ...
, the
Irish Museum of Modern Art
The Irish Museum of Modern Art ( ga, Áras Nua-Ealaíne na hÉireann) also known as IMMA, is Ireland's leading national institution for the collection and presentation of modern and contemporary art. Located in Kilmainham, Dublin, the Museum pr ...
, and the
Herbert Gallery.
Biography
* Kennedy, S. B. (2013) ''T. P. Flanagan: Painter of Light and Landscape'' (Featuring a foreword by Séamus Heaney), Lund Humphries.
References
External links
Examples of Flanagan's work in public collectionsvia ArtUK.org
Examples of the work of TP Flanagan in private collectionsvia Ross's Auctioneers & valuers.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Flanagan, TP
1929 births
2011 deaths
Painters from Northern Ireland
20th-century Irish painters
21st-century Irish painters
Irish male painters
Artists from County Fermanagh
People from Enniskillen
Members of the Royal Hibernian Academy
Alumni of Belfast School of Art
Members of the Royal Ulster Academy
Members of the Order of the British Empire
Educators from Northern Ireland
20th-century Irish male artists