Lady Rosse is a self-taught artist inspired by the landscape of the Irish midlands around her home at Birr Castle, Co Offaly …As a child I lived in a beautiful area of North Yorkshire.
I was a romantic child; I loved nature and wanted to somehow capture its beauty which I sometimes found almost overwhelming. I went to a small school in a remote area of Teesdale, where the woods on the other side of the valley were very beautiful. I started trying to draw them when I was eight or nine.
There was petrol rationing after the war so I was a weekly boarder and had to ride my pony across the fields, through the woods from my home, sketching sometimes on the way. . Later, the moorland landscapes around my Devonshire grandparents’ home with the strange tors’ on the hill tops, was another inspiration. It wasn’t a complete surprise that I enjoyed painting. In my family, both my uncle and my great-grandfather were very good watercolourists.
After I married I had more time for painting. He worked for the UN Development Programme and we spent the first years of married life in places like West Africa, Iran and Algeria. This was wonderful for my painting. I had discovered oils and the wonderful landscapes and deserts of Iran, especially, took over my painting life. I also increased my drawing skills working as a draftsman on archaeological digs there, drawing pottery and objects, which needed extreme accuracy.
I have my studio here and now try to fit painting around our busy life. But I don’t always have time. I can never work directly from photographs; I have to sketch something and the better and more detailed the sketch the better the painting will be afterwards. Now with mobile phones it is too easy just to take a photo and I am tempted, but I really need to have looked and sketched and made it mine in my head.
The exhibition is in the Copper Tree Gallery in the historic Science Galleries at Birr Castle. I am exhibiting with other artists: Jacinta Guinan who lives in Mayo, and sculptor Mark Rode. Jacinta paints small landscapes rather similar to mine, though hers are of the dramatic mountain landscapes around Mayo and Sligo. Our paintings fit well together and we have called the exhibition, From the Midlands to Mayo. Mark’s work is in an entirely different medium and provides an interesting contrast.
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