THE YELLOW RIVER - Seán McSweeney & Gerard Smyth

BIOGRAPHIES
Seán McSweeney
Seán McSweeney was born in Dublin in 1935.
Self-taught as a painter, he lived in Wicklow for
many years before moving to the west coast of
Sligo in the 1980s, surrounding himself with
the landscape that has been the leitmotif of
his work ever since. Consistently drawn to the
characteristic "horizontality" of the bogland,
sea fields and flat expanses of shoreline
that surround his home on the Sligo coast,
he returns repeatedly to the same subjects,
painting them in various lights and through
changing seasons. The resulting paintings,
drawings and prints verge on abstraction:
bog pools are reduced to rectangular shapes
bordered by grasses and plants while coastlines
are represented by bands of colour that
demarcate the boundaries between land,
sea and sky.
Seán McSweeney began exhibiting at the
Cavendish Gallery on Parnell Square, opposite
the Gate Theatre, in the late 1950s and featured
in the first Irish Exhibition of Living Art in
1962. He had his first solo show with Leo
Smith's Dawson Gallery in 1965 and has been
represented by Taylor Galleries since 1978.
The recipient of numerous awards and prizes,
he has exhibited extensively in Ireland and
abroad and is an Honorary member of the Royal
Hibernian Academy and a member of Aosdána.
His work is represented in private collections
in Ireland, the UK, Europe and North America,
as well as public collections including The
Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon, Trinity
College Dublin, Limerick City Gallery of Art,
Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Dublin
City Gallery The Hugh Lane, Ballinglen Arts
Foundation and Boyle Civic Collection.
Gerard Smyth
Gerard Smyth is a poet, critic and journalist.
He was born in Dublin where he still lives. His
poetry has appeared widely in publications in
Ireland, Britain and the United States since the
late 1960s, as well as in translation in several
languages including Italian, Romanian, French,
German, Ukrainian, Spanish and Hungarian.
His eight collections include A Song of Elsewhere
( Dedalus Press 2015) and The Fullness of Time:
New and Selected Poems ( Dedalus Press, 2010 )
He has published two limited edition books
with The Salvage Press, We Like It Here Beside the
River, with a drawing by artist Donald Teskey
and After Easter with artwork by Brian Maguire.
He was the 2012 recipient of the O'Shaughnessy
Poetry Award from the University of St
Thomas in St Paul, Minnesota. He has given
readings of his work in Moscow, St Petersburg,
Paris, Berlin, Minneapolis, St Paul, Stuttgart,
Bucharest and London, as well as participating
in many of Ireland's literary festivals. He
is co-editor, with Pat Boran, of If Ever You Go:
A Map of Dublin in Poetry and Song which was
Dublin's One City One Book in 2014. He is a
member of Aosdána and is Poetry Editor of
The Irish Times.
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