Sara McNeill

Sara McNeill was born in Belfast and educated at Battle Abbey & Millfield School, Somerset.  She obtained a Diploma in Art in 1974 and studied for her  Post Graduate  with Kenneth Webb and the Irish School of Landscape Painting. more»

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In 1975 she was elected a Fellow of the Irish School of Landscape Painting and two years later, in 1977, a Member of the Ulster Society of Women Artists . Between 1989-99, Sara  was Treasurer of U.S.W.A., and Vice President from 2000 until 2003. She is part-time lecturer with North Down & Ards College and The Irish School of Landscape Paintings.

In 1978, Sara founded “Ladybird Art Studio” in Donaghadee, Co Down - a purpose built studio facing the Irish Sea - where she provides professional training for painters  and demonstrates in all media: oils, acrylic, watercolours and mixed , to various art groups and societies throughout the North, South and West of Ireland.

Among the many commissions she has executed include panels on public and private buildings, Bank of Ireland, Planards Limited,  John House London, to name but a few. She also has work in Private Collections in USA, France, England, Italy and Ireland.

Sara has been awarded residency  at Tyrone Guthrie Centre , Newbliss, Co Monaghan, Ireland .Together with members of the Ulster Society of Women Artists, she was invited  by The Women Painters of Washington, to exhibit in a Millennium exhibition in Seattle USA

.EXHIBITIONS INCLUDE:

McNEILL’S ODYSSEY

A JOURNEY THROUGH LANDSCAPE

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not Man the less, But Nature more …
Byron 1788–1824 Canto IV

As a practicing painter and art historian, I have never believed that artists wholly control the meaning of their work. Meaning accrues; it is the product of what is invested in the work – the art object. What is important is that there is some intensity; the painter has to take some risks with the picture in an effort to attain candor and authenticity.

Sara McNeill can be described as a landscape painter, though it might be more correct to describe her as a painter of Nature in the wider sense. The artist produces fresh, vibrant, gripping paintings set for the most part in Ireland and Italy. The scale and power of her work is magestic: architecturally ordered, wild and bleak, often hauntingly beautiful, and the quality of the light stunning. Unlike some of the great eighteenth century landscape painters – for example, Thomas Roberts or Francesco Guardi – she is not purely topographical. We learn from examining her work that history and painting have the same goal; both try to represent the truth.
However, this is no easy task. As Mainie Jellett once stated: ‘The artist should not only paint what she sees before her, but also what she sees within her.’

It is in the particular detail, and McNeill’s work abounds with detail, that the ‘larger picture’ emerges. There is a self-awareness in her art that links not only its style with that of the Impressionists, but also its sources – French and Italian Romanticism. In a vein similar to the Romantics, the artist’s world is culturally heterogeneous, a utilitarian place of old and new. For the viewer, she captures in paint, consciously and subconsciously, images of golden sunlight reflecting from the facades of Venetian palaces and churches, hills and mountain ranges, long empty beaches and expanses of chilly sea. McNeill’s fidelity to the facts underlines the fact that the landscape in her work is invariably a social landscape, as social as the world in a Ruisdael painting, an environment in which people live their lives and deal with everyday experiences, with minor triumphs and setbacks, with the normal comforts, losses and regrets.

When we look at McNeill’s work, we discover that her approach ‘translates’ rather than purely ‘illustrates.’ History and painting are complex, what you see on the surface does not always tell you very much. The artist is deeply interested in place as marked by historical events, and though historical references are never explicit in the work, a sense of history often motivates her response to place. As always, one has to dig to get some perspective.

In short, McNeill’s exhibition is a compendium of the contrasting shapes, colours and textures to be found in the dazzling clear lakes of Connemara and the architectural splendours of Venice – is indeed ‘a journey through landscape.’

Dr. Michael Casey
Artist, Curator and Government of Ireland Post-Doctoral Fellow