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Michael Flaherty
Born in Cloghane, Brandon Co. Kerry, Michael Flaherty?s true vocation to painting came out of curiosity.
?No city or landscape is truly real until it has been given the quality of myth by a writer or painter, or its association with great events. The way Michael Flaherty is dealing with the Brandon area is part of this mythologizing, the making of this area very special? . He attended school at Killarney, then graduated with a BA in UCC and a H. Dip in Maynooth in 1974. He never really wanted to teach so he took a year out lived in Inniscarra and came to drawing almost out of boredom. He states that he basically found a pencil, ?I thought this was it ? it was like discovering language? .
He took night classes at the Crawford and benefited from his teacher of John Burke. He then applied to Sligo School of Art and was accepted on enthusiasm alone. Here he was taught by John O?Leary. It was here that he found his style. He spent some time in Edinburgh but he returned to Kerry after the death of a relative in 1988 and evolved this style until it was personal to him.
Below is a recent review of Michael's work by Aidan Dunne, published in 'The Arts' section of The Irish Times:
"Michael Flaherty's 'Dark Light' at the Hallward Gallery is appropriately entitled given that it marks a decisive move away from the bold colours he has previously favoured. His new work is more muted and more tonal generally, though he still relishes strong contrasts, with splashes of vivid yellow, for example.
"He is a landscape painter, and he concentrates on the landscape around him, that is the Cloghane-Brandon area under Mount Brandon and including the valley of the Abhainn Mhor River. What seems to have happened is that his growing knowledge and appreciation of this terrain have deepened his sense of engagement not with place per se but with the structure of the landscape.
"Where the earlier, more colourful paintings were about surface, now there is a sense of layered process, of great stretches of time and slow change."
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