Hughie O'Donoghue RA (b.1953) Fallen Elm (Kilfane) Oil on board, 71 x 122cm (28 x 48) Signed, inscribed and dated 2007/'8 verso In 1995, Hughie O’Donoghue and his wife Clare moved to Ireland. They settled in Kilfane Glebe, an early 19th century property including some ten acres of what he described as “Arcadian” landscape close to Thomastown in Co Kilkenny. In time he set about creating a substantial studio, capable of accommodating even the largest paintings. After about twelve years, they thought of moving on, and have subsequently divided their time between London and North Mayo, from where his mother had reluctantly emigrated to England in 1937. In the few years prior to leaving Kilfane, he increasingly incorporated the immediate landscape in his paintings, perhaps aware that he would soon be leaving it behind. He walked the land every day and, as he said, an overriding theme in his work is “fading memory.” There is a fondly elegiac cast to a great deal of the paintings he made at this time. That applies equally to the Kilfane setting and to Mayo, where he was headed: he came across the shattered statue in Fallen Angel (2007) in the remote cemetery where his grandfather is buried in Mayo. Fallen Elm (Kilfane) is a close companion to Fallen Angel, and a variation on one of his recurrent subjects: the sleeper or dreamer folded into the earth. It shares the template of a photographic element on the right, here the horizontal trunk of a felled, hollowed elm, and a material insertion into the fabric of the painting on the left. In Fallen Angel the insertion is a wooden cross; here it is a door or window-shaped rectangle, a metaphor, perhaps, for the painting as a point of access to the buried past. These insertions were found materials, usually wood panels or planks retained during the restoration of Kilfane, an assertion of painting’s status for him as a kind of concrete poetry. O’Donoghue’s gifts as a tactile painter with a pitch perfect instinct for colour and tonal values are fully evident in this exceptional work. The glorious burst of light - life itself - renders the elm as a symbol of all of nature, heroic, fallen, but an integral part of earth’s regenerative cycle. Aidan Dunne, August 2022