Description :

Having missed the opportunity to study abroad as a young man, in 1971 aged sixty-one, Patrick Collins moved to Paris. Throughout the period that he lived and worked in the city, his art became looser and more expressive. Returning to Ireland, he continued to experiment and produce innovative work throughout the final decades of his life. It was also during this period that Collins gained recognition from the art world, including being elected as the first Saoi of Aosdána.

Painted when the artist was seventy-nine years old, Farmland belongs to a body of experimental work that Collins embarked upon during the 1980s. Moving away from his celebrated atmospheric images of the Irish landscape, and exchanging his characteristic palette of greys, blues and browns for heightened tones of orange and green, he began to work with large pieces of canvas that he cut, or asked others to cut, into irregular shapes. Allowing the resulting forms to influence his final painting, Collins introduced an element of chance into his creative process.

Although the title of this work suggests a landscape, the image, constructed from expressive brush strokes, is an abstracted face.

Written by Riann Coulter