eyes on, not merely recording what can be seen in nature but creating a mental and psychic tension which she uses as a counterpoint for the constituent elements within her paintings. The lyrical core of her inspiration is her anxious acceptance of nature and all its creatures as they expand into life, to be savoured the moment they appear and yet moulded through the knowing filter of memory. As far removed from the fleeting language of impressionism as from the expressionist re-workings of reality, Anne's work is a highly personal response to the multitude of cultural stimuli affecting her artistic excursus. Though her oft renewed contact with the locations of her existential geography; Irish coastlines, Spanish villages, Greek islands, the Tuscan landscape, the Roman countryside, she has skilfully crafted a new iconography, no longer restrained either by the conventions of nineteenth century naturalism or by the avant-garde aesthetics of the twentieth century. Her early works were influenced by a climate of renewed interest in the realistic, never elusive and conventional, which was rooted in the pioneering works of artists in the 1950s, Giacometti and Bacon, Sutherland and de Staël, a revival which was called to reckon with a total crisis in the value of the image, typical of post-war art. The representation of the truth, as experienced by artists of that era or as a means to negate an object's value, or alternatively as a point of reference in gaining knowledge about the world, in Donnelly's painting succeeds in reaffirming its own philosophical and spiritual validity.
Faced with the chaotic vagueness with which the world presents itself to our conscious selves, Anne’s painting appears to reconstruct a higher order and, despite the persistence of the tonal vestiges of phenomenal appearance, it is not the tangible presence but the essence of things which intrigues the artist. As in oriental art, rather than the hic et nunc of optical perception it is the pull towards eternity which Anne shares in part with the language of Piero della Francesca and in part with the aesthetics of Morandi. Liberated from the restraints imposed by the rules of perspective and form, her paintings are the visual translation of emotions stemming from what her conscience has seen and interiorized. The painter also sets out to go beyond constantly changing appearances, in such a way that her paintings do not depict the subjective world projected into visible things but rather it is the true substance which discovers the universe in the short-term, in so doing transforming perception into conscience. Without ever falling into the trap of illustrative triviality, the artist approaches everyday life armed with a profound awareness of the intrinsic value of everything around her, no matter how fleeting: a jug, a seagull in flight or her own garden in flower. The colour is lifelike yet fantastic: it has the fluidity of Matisse's surfaces, the density of Nicolas de Staël's form, the material intensity of Jean Fautrier, yet in her paintings, Anne imbues matter with an added lightness, fluidity, caressed by atmospheric light, without however allowing any of its latent energy to be dispersed. Hers is not the light “en plein air” of the Impressionists, changing ceaselessly so as to convey the instantaneous nature of the visual experience, but rather a diffused, airy, intimate luminosity which envelops her landscapes without conferring any indication of time of day or season, lending them an almost supersensible radiance. The resultant image is the manifestation of an interior tale, enriched by the Bergsonesque flow of time and being, a place where thoughts and states of mind are allowed to accumulate and ultimately foster a more meaningful figurative reality. The coves of the west coast of Ireland, the sun-drenched villages of southern Spain, the Greek coastlines; their memories overlap and form poetic, absolute places, bathed in a rarefied aura, imbued with serenity: her landscapes blush with delicate shades of pink, the sky full of birds in flight, the sea reflecting the crisply-outlined clouds of a dawn (or maybe dusk?) which will never actually break since it has already achieved an implicit, balanced beauty. Seagulls, dwellers of the sky, soaring to celestial heights in their excited flight and yet showing no disdain for the earth, are the protagonists of many of her paintings. Like de Staël, the dramatic artist of Russian extraction whose pictorial language has, on more than one occasion, been likened to that of our artist, Anne also loves to paint these birds, these navigators of infinity, free forms, almost abstracted from the elegant linearity of their anatomy, notes of grace drifting through the endless orchestration of the skies, musical counterpoints to the awe-inspiring concert of the universe, metaphors of her “indomito cuore mai sazio di volo” (indomitable heart- never tired of soaring. Carlo Mazzantini).

Bruna Condoleo

(Translated by Sara Smith (CSE)

The poetic universe of "Onia", Peppercanister Gallery, Dublin - 7- 23  May 2009

peppercanister@eircom.net