Jim reaches for the stars as he helps COPE build new refuge

“Essentially, it’s about colour,” says artist Jim Kavanagh, describing his latest, multi-layered exhibition, The Cosmological Sublime. “I am a colourist and have been doing colour for 35 years.”

Most of Jim’s colour, up to now, has been invested in capturing the landscape, using vivid, vibrant oils, either on canvas or on board. But for his latest show in the Connacht Tribune Gallery in Market Street, the Annaghdown based artist has moved away from the earth, soaring skyward towards the stars and beyond. But the colour still reigns supreme, whether it’s vivid orange stars and suns, purple-hued images of outer space, or planets and moons in varying shades of blue and black.

“It’s about romanticism in art – about nature being big and man being small,” says Jim about the impressive and colourful body of work that fills the large gallery space.

Jim’s influences include the English Romantic artist JMW Turner and German-Danish Expressionist Emil Nolde as well as American abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko. But he has given a new twist to these Romantic-Expressionist influences by involving the Hubble Telescope, first launched in 1990, in his latest work: “It’s looking into the stars for the 21st century,” he says.

Jim was born in London to Irish parents and did a degree of Fine Art at the University of Middlesex before going on to teach at third-level for several years. He then divided his time between London and Galway for a period, teaching and working as an artist, before opting to settle fulltime in Annaghdown with his wife Anne Riordan, who is from Mayo.

He no longer lectures in art but he does run an art school in Annaghdown, close to his home and studio.  And the sky there has helped inspire his new body of work, which has taken about two and a half years to create.

He points to a painting of the moon which came about following the short walk from house to studio late at night.

“I saw the moon up there and said, ‘it’d be cool to do that’. He did, managing to create subtle shading all around it – hard to do, he says.

Jim’s works are mostly abstract, so how does he know when a painting is finished?

“It’s a feeling,” he says. “Sometimes, weeks after I think I’ve finished something I’ll enhance the colours and then I’ll know it’s finished.”

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.