Artwork description:

This print “Mountjoy Square” was created for the “Urbis Felicitas” exhibition of prints at the Graphic Studio Gallery in Dublin in 2016. The exhibition, organised by the Graphic Studio in association with the Mountjoy Square Society, invited printmakers to respond to the heritage of Northside Dublin's Georgian past. In keeping with this theme, my print depicts Mountjoy Square as it might have looked during it's heyday. I took inspiration from the lovely set of James Malton 25 colour aquatint prints of Georgian Dublin, which were created around the same time as the building of Mountjoy Square. The centre of the print depicts the original intended layout of the impressive railed garden/square. The surrounding image panels are arranged in order to replicate the road structure around the square, so that the print, when viewed from a distance, looks rather like a map view. The layout of the print emphasizes the structured and symmetrical layout of the Square. The bottom panel depicts a street-level view of Mountjoy Square. The top panel shows a panorama aerial view of what Mountjoy Square may have looked like back in the 1800s. The inspiration for this particular panel came from the James Mahony panoramic watercolour “Dublin from the Spire of St George's Church, Hardwicke Place”, created c.1854 (on view in National Gallery of Ireland) That watercolour shows Mountjoy Square within the vista. The two side panels show street views which serve to “enclose” the square within the image. The four corner panels depict the beauty of the Georgian doors. With my aviation background, I couldn't resist the “red, is port, is left ...”.

Materials used:

Photopolymer plate, etching press, watercolours, inks

Tags: