Áine Andrews Artist 

Áine Andrews portraits and paintings from old photos  ​

Portaits 

I have always loved drawing faces and so portrait painting became my speciality. I managed to keep this going even when working full time as an art teacher in Coláiste Choilm Ballincollig and was delighted to get plenty of requests for drawings of children. 

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i returned to art college in 1987 as a mature student and completed a Diploma in Fine Art which complemented my initial teaching degree. While working on this I found a diary of my Dad’s and some photos in my Mum’s box that exactly matched the entries. The events of summer 1940 when they first met were nothing extraordinary but the simple story of bicycle rides and bus tours shone a little light on their lives. I felt compelled to express this in painting and so began what was to be a lifelong fascination with old phots and the stories they tell. 

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Retirement from teaching in 2013 brought a new opportunity to paint and I returned to an idea that had been germinating for some time to produce a series of paintings based on professional photographs taken in Patrick St.

 

Over several decades photographers George and Val Healy captured the ordinary people of Cork going about their day to day business.  Some posed and smiled and others were caught unawares but the pictures offer a little window through time to the everyday lives of those who walked those same streets before us.  My parents had them and my husband Robert also had himself with his mother but I reckoned there had to be one or two of these pictures in every family album in Cork. So I began to ask around and the response was overwhelming with photos coming at me from all over and people more than happy to share their family stories.

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Demonstation of painting for the Maclise society in the Crawford Gallery

April 2017

 

Of What is Past

 

Old family photographs have a way of touching deep emotions. French philosopher Roland Barthes wrote that detail in these images provokes the greatest emotion, as well as the most intense and personal reaction. He argued that the essence of photography is the implied message: ‘this has been’ but it can also be said that these fleeting moments snatched from the flow of time represent an eternal present.

 

The concept of people who are at once so familiar to us and yet represent strangers because we did not exist then, is a really strange one but these faded images have now become part of our present.

 

This work is concerned with the narrative capacity of the photograph and its great power to stir emotions. I consider the paintings as translations of photographs and I have endeavoured to recreate that ‘smile for the camera’ moment held forever in that eternal present.

 

The original images were taken on St Patrick St Cork over a thirty-year period by professional photographers George and Val Healy who captured those everyday moments in a busy shopping street of the families, couples and friends at a time when personal cameras were not so usual. Similar in style, format and setting these photographs are now part of family albums and collections all over the city and county and it was my idea to bring these together.

 

I envisaged the series as one entity, suggesting the street itself - that one constant in the ever passing and changing movement of people. We all have our brief moment in the street and this reminds us, in the words of William Butler Yeats  ‘Of what is past, or passing, or to come’.

 

Áine Andrews