Magnificent, powerful art exhibition opens in Birr Theatre
‘the fontanelle is understood as a doorway: the place through which the spirit enters at birth’
A magnificent, powerful art exhibition has opened in Birr Theatre & Arts Centre and is running until the end of November. A visit is strongly recommended.
The exhibition is called Fontanelle. Created by the excellent and highly skilled Birr artist Chris O’Donoghue, these 13 paintings are vibrant and striking and would look very well on anyone’s home walls.
Chris has often been asked what style of paintings are these 13 works. “People have asked me are they abstract or surrealist? I like to think of them as being a type of map charting the different stages in a person’s inner, spiritual, religious journey.” The viewer can spend long periods of time looking at these paintings and feeling the tranquillity, insight and peace emanating from them.
At the launch of the exhibition on Saturday afternoon Chris walked us through the paintings. He explained to us that they are partly inspired by the fontanelle. This is the soft spot at the crown of every newborn’s head, where the bones of the skull have not yet joined. “In many traditions around the world,” commented Chris, “the fontanelle is understood as a doorway: the place through which the spirit enters at birth, travels in dreams and meditation, and departs at the end of life.”In this new exhibition Chris is leading us through that doorway and into a place of deep calm and healing. It is an antidote for our hectic and frequently misguided world.
These 13 paintings are large, each around a metre square, “tracing the stages of a spiritual journey in the shamanic tradition,” explains Chris, “revealing a visionary architecture to the world beyond and encounters with angelic and holy beings along the way.”
In previous acclaimed exhibition Chris focussed on the magnificent landscapes of Kerry and North America. In this exhibition he has switched his attention from the outside world to the inner world.
Chris has taught art to generations of local people over many years. Manager of Birr Theatre Emma Nee Haslam told us on Saturday that she herself had been taught by Chris during the 1980s and had deeply valued the experience.
Many years ago Chris studied the Arts in Leicester University, completed a postgraduate teaching qualification in West Sussex, and went on to study at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin.
Returning home to Birr, he painted sets for Birr Stage Guild and was a long-standing member of the Birr Arts Group. He worked as an art teacher at Cistercian College Roscrea for many years, inspiring generations of young artists.
Chris has been exhibiting his work for more than forty years, through a variety of mediums, including oils, acrylics, watercolours, oil pastels, chalk, Japanese ink and even car painting spray.
Pointing to a painting called “Let there be light...the first glimmer” Chris explained that there comes a moment in Meditation where the meditator, “once he has calmed his mind enters that state which the Buddhists called a blue field mind, during which the transformative, liberating energy from beyond begins to flow through into the meditator.”
Pointing to a second painting, which is called “I want to be in everything...It is the destiny of darkness to be devoured by the light”, he explained that in some traditions darkness is not perceived in a negative, abyssal light, but rather it is suffused with transcendence.
Chris said he went through a very serious hospital operation some years ago and ever since he emerged successfully from it he has felt very grateful for the continuance of his life in this mortal world of ours. A yellow zig zag line in his Fontanelle paintings depicts the post-op scar, transfigured by insight, on his body. The paintings are for sale.