Philip Flanagan was born in Belfast in 1960, and graduated from Camberwell College in London in 1985. In the last twenty years he has gained a reputation as a painter and sculptor, with works in major collections in Ireland, Britain and America. His first large scale exhibition of paintings in England was well summarized by a reviewer in the Independent on Sunday.
'Flanagan's work as a sculptor has led to international acclaim.... He has [now] transferred his skills to abstract painting. [These] have a breath taking serenity and, often, an underlying sculptural feel from both their composition and the layers of colour Flanagan uses to build up a picture.' 30. 11. 2003.
Flanagan's paintings and sculpture are in the great tradition of western art. His concern with form, texture and colour are part of a heritage extending back to the Renaissance and beyond. His fundamental goal, however is spiritual. 'I'm interested in the energy of the Fermanagh countryside and want to get across a feeling of calm, of solitude and stillness. Looking out over the fields, the lake, and the islands, it is clear that there is more to the whole thing than is first visible. In my paintings, I want to create a carapace of light and texture that vibrates, that gets across the spirituality of the Irish landscape.'
Philip Flanagan is the son of T.P Flanagan. He was born in Belfast in 1960. He studied art at the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts in London. He is considered one of the most talented Irish sculptors of his generation, his work having been shown in exhibitions at the Barbican Centre and Christie’s Inaugural, London, the Concept Gallery, Pittsburg, and regularly at the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, and the Royal Ulster Academy, Belfast. From October to December 1991 he was artist-in-residence at the Ulster Museum. His work is represented in several private and public collections, including Fermanagh County Museum, Enniskillen; the Irish Writers’ Museum and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; and the Ulster Museum, Belfast.
Philip Flanagan made his reputation as a portrait sculptor, notably with a series of some twenty studies of well-known Irish actors, artists, musicians, sportsmen and politicians. He has also executed commissions for public sculptures, including a memorial to the victims of the Enniskillen bombing (1991); a relief in limestone for Castlederg, County Tyrone (l993), and a similar work for the Cathedral of the Assumption, County Carlow (I 998); a bronze fountain for the town of Carrickfergus, County Antrim (1997), and, a new departure for him, a semi- abstract piece, Reflections on Water, for Fermanagh County Museum to mark the Millennium.
Reflections on Water is similar in theme and execution to a number of the pieces exhibited here. The subject-matter is landscape, the composition being based, in the artist’s words, ‘on forms abstracted from the landscape around Lough Erne, where he now lives. The sculpted forms were also in part derived from a series of watercolour drawings made outside on the spot, a method of working that informs all Flanagan’s art. The materials he has chosen for these sculptures also locate them specifically in the Fermanagh landscape and are important to one’s reading of them. The base is made from ash (there is an ancient ash wood close by his Lough Erne studio), the pattern of the grain complements the movement suggested by the glass and metal fins placed above, which in turn symbolise water, which holds the reflections of the bronze forms as they rise above it.
Taken from 'Ireland Today: Five painters and a Sculptor'
Messums of London publication 2000
