Beschreibung:

Artist: George Campbell RHA RUA (1917-1979) Title: Still Life With Many Things Signature: signed lower right Medium: oil on board Size: 91½ x 104cm (35 x 41in) Provenance: By descent from the artist De Veres, Dublin 27th June 2000, Lot 27 Private Collection More info: Click to read more about this lot Born in Arklow, Campbell began painting during the Blitz in Belfast and held his first solo exhibition in Dublin with Victor Waddington, 1946. Receiving stained glass commissions from the Church in the early 1960's marked a turning point in the artist's career. Prizes followed which attracted positive press coverage leading to more demand for his work. Fascinated with Spain from childhood, Campbell visited Spain in 1951 with his wife, Madge and Gerard Dillon and returned to Andalusia annually for the winter months till the late 1970's. It's likely Campbell made a sketch of this work while in residence in Spain and transferred it to an oil painting in Ireland as "many things" were sourced from a beach. "Jorge" Campbell as his Spanish friends knew him was a fluent Spanish speaker and an accomplished Flamenco guitarist. By the 1960's music in Ireland and Spain became intertwined in his life and it affected his painting. Influenced by Braque, Campbell's still life paintings are never rigid or set in formal surroundings. Flashes of colour, shifting forms and emerging shapes permeate the surface adding mystery, vitality and movement. Campbell painted still life from the early 1950's often with a window view from his apartment and he revisited the subject throughout his career but his approach to it changed over a thirty year period. Never wishing to wait for inspiration, he usually worked on a few paintings at the same time, employing a variety of techniques with contrasting colour to achieve variations of form. Pale and strong colour is combined with dark and warm browns resulting in a coherently balanced composition. Versatile, Campbell did not confine himself to easel painting. He wrote articles for "The Artist magazine and published Eyeful of Ireland, 1974, a comic interpretation of history in Ireland. He illustrated for W.J.Hogan's "Out of Season", 1978, designed setting for the theatre, and contributed to television programmes on Ireland, Spain and Flamenco music. A romantic, Campbell stated that painting was part of his "whole fabric, part of breathing and reading and eating and sleeping and walking and moving." Kenneth Jamison remarked in his foreword for the artist's Arts Council exhibition, 1966 that Campbell had an "intuitive feeling for life-and for art as essential element of living, that makes George Campbell in both his person and his painting, so exciting to be with." Karen Reihill March 2015