Eamon Colman - Scattered Showers
Cristin Leach Hughes
The Sunday Times May 26, 2013
Eamon Colman - Scattered Showers
The long, wordy titles of Colman's weather paintings are almost as enjoyable as the compositions themselves. The Benignant Touch of Half Hearted Precipitation features a swirl of fleshy cloud with chalk·blue spattering nudging towards a cascade of turf-coloured rain. Elsewhere, a twist of yellow takes centre page, or tendrils of wispy white reach into a bluish-pink whirlpool. The Kilkenny-based artist's more obvious landscape scenes feature low-lying vistas and intense explosions of pigment. A green cloud bursts over a radiant pink, blue and green horizon in The Astonishing Art of Cold and Snap. There are echoes of Barrie Cooke's god-beams and JMW Turner's sea storms. but Colman's style has an energy all of its own. He is weather’s witness, translating emotional experience into light and colour as much as land and sky. If there's one thing Ireland does well, it's unpredictable weather and this may be the most sane and passionate response by an Irish artist yet.
