Una Watters’ first retrospective in over 50 years is going into its second week and there has been lots of interest in both the exhibition and in the painter, whose work has been hidden for so long. There has been much media interest in the show and both the Sunday Independent and The Irish Times have covered the exhibition. RTE Lyric FM also ran a broadcast in its Culture File slot.
For those of you who might have missed it, see below for links to the media coverage of Una and her work.
This striking poster designed by Kieran O’Connor and featuring Una Watters Self-Portrait in Green (1943), is a fitting showcase for a new retrospective of Una’s work opening on March 10 at the United Arts Club, Dublin.
Fifty-six years ago in November 1966, a year after her death, Una’s husband, Eugene, organised her first retrospective. That event was hosted by the Painters’ Gallery on St Stephen’s Green, only a stone’s throw from the United Arts Club on Fitzwilliam Street. The intervening half-century has seen the virtual disappearance of Una’s work from public view. That’s why we think this show is important.
Although this is a smaller show – featuring over 20 works from the 1966 show, plus some newly discovered watercolours – we’re hoping that the exhibition will help to put Una’s name in lights, where it belongs.
Una Watters: Into the Light will be launched by Dr Roisin Kennedy (UCD) on Thursday, March 10 @ 6pm. All welcome.
We’re very pleased to announce that the retrospective exhibition we’ve been working towards for the last two-and-a-half years, Una Watters: Into the Light, will go ahead at the United Arts Club in Dublin next month. (Details below)
Our aim is to recreate as closely as possible the last retrospective of Una’s work, a posthumous exhibition organised by her husband, Eugene Watters. We used the catalogue of this exhibition as a guide in our quest to trace Una’s “lost” paintings. Because we didn’t manage to find all 37 works in that show, the 2022 retrospective is, by necessity, smaller. However, it does feature some work not in the 1966 exhibition and some newly discovered watercolours.
Although Una Watters: Into the Light is by its nature a backward glance at Una’s work, we like to think it’ll be a step forward in terms of her visibility and reputation.
The Farm, featured above, (oil on canvas, 36 x 31.5 cms) is one of the paintings that you’ll be able to see in the show which will run from March 10 to April 2.
It’s a late work (1964) and represents territory very close to Una’s heart, featuring as it does her parental home and the land around it at Cappagh Cross, Finglas. The same landscape is depicted in Harvest (see our blog, “The Grim Reaper”, Nov 21, 2020) and even tangentially in the background of Flowerpiece (“A Time of Gifts”, Dec 22, 2021)
What probably isn’t clear from the reproduction here is that Una used gold leaf for the meadow that dominates the painting, devouring over half of the pictorial space. Gold leaf is more often associated with religious paintings although the modernist painter Patrick Scott (1921 – 2014), a near contemporary of Una’s, and one of the first Irish exponents of pure abstraction, incorporated geometrical forms in gold leaf against a pale tempura background in his iconic mature work.
Meditation Painting 28 – Patrick Scott. Photograph: IMMA
Some of Una’s early work concentrated on religious themes e.g. Annunciation (1943) which was shown in the original 1966 retrospective and is now, unfortunately, lost. Another painting, The Flight into Egypt, is mentioned in correspondence. Due to an oversight by Una’s husband, Eugene, it was not included in the 1966 show although it was in the possession of Una’s sister at the time. This work, too, has not been located.
Una’s use of gold leaf in The Field, a secular work, is an interesting choice. It lends a spiritual emphasis to the pastoral idyll, elevating nature to the sacred realm. Harvest, one of her last works, has the same golden glow, though without gold leaf so its atmosphere is predominantly nostalgic. (The work is known colloquially among family members as Tea in the Fields.)
One of the figures in The Farm might well be Una herself and it, too, might be a recollection of a childhood scene. The naieve depiction of the farm buildings and house, the ducks in the pale blue pond, even the expanse of the meadow suggest a child’s eye perspective, intimating the vastness of the landscape and, temporally, the seeming endlessness of summer days.
It’s unclear what the figure in white is doing – pointing to something or perhaps she’s picking blackberries? Is that a pail in her left hand? Compare the stance of this figure to the two gambolling girls – Eugene Watters’ nieces – in Wild Apples (“Wild Apples”, June 24, 2020). Another female figure is lolling against a green mound while on the far right a calf, or is it a large dog, stands motionless in the sunshine. So far, so figurative. But the long, stalky green shadows and those trademark cubist trees show Una’s late abstract tendencies, as does the patterning of the landscape.
It’s unlikely that Una would ever have travelled to the far-reaches of abstraction that Patrick Scott inhabited, although his early work was, like Una’s, highly representational. (He jokingly referred to himself as an Irish Grandma Moses.) But it does beg the question – would Una, like Scott, have moved further into abstraction had she lived?
Una Watters:Into the Lightruns at the United Arts Club, 3 Upr Fitzwilliam Street, Dublin 2, March 10 – April 2, 2022.
Another reason to celebrate Una Watters’ birthday month, is a new sculpture to be launched in Kildonan Park, Finglas, this week that pays homage to Una’s work
The Bridge: Finglas Ravens Soar, is a seven-metre-tall steel sculpture by Sara Cunningham-Bell, commissioned by Dublin City Council/Sculpture Dublin, for the 20-acre public park comprising two figures with arms raised holding high a mirrored steel ‘river rug’.
The sculpture is a compendium piece, threaded through with symbols and motifs reflecting the artistic and cultural life of the locality – including the figures of running schoolboys from Una Watters’ seminal painting, Cappagh Road, and representations of An Claidheamh Soluis (Sword of Light), the symbol she designed to mark the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising in 1966 – see elsewhere on this site.
Coincidentally, the sculpture was installed on November 4, Una’s 103th birthday.
Inspired by the Irish translation of Finglas – ‘Fionnghlas’ (clear streamlet) – the sculpture draws on other influential figures associated with the area, such as Sophie Pierce-Healy, an aviatrix who flew her plane, “The Silver Lining”, from Kildonan Aerodrome, Ireland’s first commercial airport in the 1920s, along with celebrated uileann piper Séamus Ennis.
The Kildonan Park work was a ‘participative’ commission. Over the past year, hundreds of local residents have engaged with Sculpture Dublin by taking part in over 40 creative workshops, focus groups, public meetings and other engagement activities related to the installation.
The Bridge: Fiacha Dhubha Fhionglaise ar Foluain’ will have a public launch on site at Kildonan Park on Saturday, November 13, at 2pm.
Woman Sewing (dimensions unavailable) is a work of Una’s that dates to 1958. It featured on the cover of the catalogue for her posthumous 1966 exhibition, organised by her husband Eugene, and held at the Dublin Painters Gallery on St Stephen’s Green, almost 55 years ago.
It’s timely to be considering this work today since we’ve finalised dates for our own retrospective of Una’s work (after a number of COVID- led cancellations) for March 11 – April 3, 2022, at the United Arts Club, 3 Fitzwilliam Street Upper, Dublin.
This show will feature as many of the works we can trace from the 1966 show – currently tallying at 26 out of 37 – plus her rediscovered watercolours ( the Emerald Ballroom series – see elsewhere on this site).
Woman Sewing has a strangely anatomical quality as if we’re seeing the subject with x-ray vision – down to her very bones. Look at her arms, or her clearly delineated breasts like perfect moon-like globes under her workaday pinafore. Her sewing hand is minutely rendered, the slender tapering figures, the translucent fingernails and the precise grip of the needle. Light blossoms at her throat in a rounded countour that echoes her breasts and even the pattern she’s embroidering. So although the painting is figurative, there’s a geometrical abstraction at work here as well.
The blue/black palette is reminiscent of Meditation, an undated work of Una’s that we’ve discussed elsewhere in the blog, (August 16,2020) but unlike Meditation this work is not delving into the mystical, but observing more earthy pursuits.
Here is a woman absorbed in craft work. The expression on her face is inward-looking, her eyes downcast, a smile playing on her lips. It’s a depiction of someone taking pride and pleasure in artistic work. It could even be seen as a stylised self-portrait ( Una was a talented seamstress).
The sad thing about Woman Sewing is that although we’ve traced the owner of the work, he cannot locate it, so it’s both found and lost. His family came into possession of it after the 1966 show, he told me, and he remembers it being on display in the house in the 1960s. But at some stage it was put away and now he’s not sure where it might be.
We’re hoping if he reads this he might send another search party into the attic so that it can join its companions in the upcoming show. As the shop window image for her original retrospective, Woman Sewing really needs to be in the 2022 show.
Addendum: Please go to comments at the top of this post where similarities are drawn by one of our followers between Una’s Woman Sewing and the work of Fernand Leger. I include the images referenced here.
Una Watters (1918-1965) 