Artists Statement :
An atmosphere and a quietness, have always been characteristics of my paintings. My prime interest has always been in the subtle transitions between different areas of tone, light and muted colours achieved through the use of light applications of paint. Originally a painter of pure abstract works, I have over the years looked more and more to reality and distilled this into my work.
Water’s Edge : A series of new paintings which i have ben working on over the last 4 years. First exhibited at The South Tipperary Arts Centre in February 2023, this series was then continued and added to for my current exhibition at Custom House Studios and Gallery in Westport in February 2024. This series will also be shown by The Paul Kane Gallery at the Irish Architectural Archive, Merrion Square, Dublin in April 2024.
The sea is glimpsed at in all of these works but they are not sea paintings per se.. Their focus is on the shape of headlands, piers, slipways, strips of water, roofs -areas forming a boundary with the water or breaking the block of water or sky. The solidity of land and the surrounding infrastructure is contrasted with and used to emphasise the airiness and openness of sea and sky. This series gravitates towards horizontals, distance, direction, echoes, gaps, openings, and connections/separations.
These paintings play with abstraction and representation - finding and emphasising abstract forms in reality, while also observing nuances of colour, tone and form to evoke mood/atmosphere.
Familiarity and building relationships with the places that inspire, has become a very important element in the work. Many return visits to inspirations in North Mayo, and East Cork into Waterford, result in getting absorbed in the places, observing them from different vantage points and in different lights.
Outer Edges Series.: A few years back, I moved studio and home, to an area on the border/edge of city and country. Views from my studio and observations from nearby day trips replaced previous inspiration drawn from memories of foreign travel. My surroundings seeped into my work and I became fascinated by how light and weather constantly transformed my view and sometimes obliterated it. Absorbing myself in seeing my view anew, I repeatedly observed and studied it at different times of day, in different seasons and from different vantage points.
Industrial buildings became receptacles for light, forms emerged and disappeared in and out of the grey blue surround. Horizontal bands of sky, sea and land which featured in my older works are also in this series, seen now with varying degrees of detail within them. Vertical forms of industrial landmarks combine with these horizontal bands to break the horizon line. The prominence of the lyrical, airy, ephemeral grey blue tones of sea and sky is contrasted and anchored by the sharper more graphic, vertical urban motifs.
The paintings are very much about this contrast between air and solid ground, the natural and urban, the lyrical and hard edged, the visible and vanishing, the transient and fixed. They are also just as importantly about the atmosphere and the formal explorations of tone, a reduced palette and divisions of the picture surface.
Writing By Others :
Ita Freeney’s work is known for its Zen-like stillness. A lover of the great outdoors, her new exhibition at the Custom House Gallery in Westport, Co Mayo features a body of paintings inspired by walks near her home in East Cork and Ballycastle, Co Mayo, where she has been a regular visitor.
“I’ve called the exhibition Water’s Edge. Our house in Glounthane overlooks the estuary of the River Lee, so that’s been an obvious influence,” she says. “This particular series of paintings is very much about the boundary between land and water. I don't know what fascinates me so much about that. I think it's just a contrast between the hardness of the land - and manmade structures like the piers - and the openness and airiness of the water and sky.
“I usually gravitate towards the quiet. But there’s one painting in the show that's inspired by the old fisherman's pier in Cobh. It's a very busy place, and it's very unlike me to have gone for this subject matter, because it's all old bins and containers. But I think that's just what I liked about it; that row of bins and things against the sky.”
Freeney’s association with Ballycastle came about through the Ballinglen Arts Foundation, which is based in the village and awards residencies to artists throughout the year. She has visited regularly since 2019, having stepped back from her full-time position as administrator and manager of the Lavit Gallery in Cork, where she continues to work part-time as a senior gallery assistant.
She was just back from a two-week stay in Ballycastle when covid hit in early 2020. “And then the gallery closed,” she says, “so I had all this time in the studio and all this fresh inspiration. I used to have a space at Backwater Studios in Cork, but after we moved to Glounthane in 2012, we knocked the wall between two bedrooms so I could have a studio at home. Obviously, the lockdowns were terrible in many ways, but I did get a lot of work done. There's one painting called Lifting that I think of as my Covid painting because it's got a brighter blue than I’d usually use; I was kind of hanging on to a bit of hope.”
Freeney is such a stalwart of the art scene in Cork that one could easily mistake her for a native. In fact, she grew up in Dublin. She comes from a long line of artists; her father Edward is a plein air painter, who worked as a signwriter and designer until his retirement. His contracts included painting full-colour 7-Up and Harp ads on the buses for CIE, and Freeney often worked with him in the summers. It was not unusual to see examples of their work trundling around the city centre.
“We’d paint these big bulletin boards as well,” says Freeney. “Growing up, it was great to have those kinds of experiences. Signwriting was the family trade, but it was just the day job for my father. He’s been showing for years with the Watercolour Society of Ireland and the Dublin Painting & Sketching Club. He brought us to exhibitions from a very young age, and he was always getting us to give our opinions on his paintings. At home, it was always understood that I wanted to go to art college. I was lucky to have had that kind of support.”
Freeney studied at the Crawford College of Art in Cork. There was, she insists, no great plan to get out of Dublin. “It just happened that way,” she says. “And I ended up staying. At college, I studied painting, with photography as a subsidiary. It was all black and white at that stage, and I think that brought something into the paintings because I'm very much interested in tone and composition. But really, it was painting all the way, and I’ve always preferred to work in oils. You get so used to the smell of the paint, and the flow of it. I’ve tried acrylics, but when they harden they have more of a plasticky feel to them. You don’t get that with oils.”
Freeney’s influences include the 19th-century artist James McNeill Whistler, who is celebrated for his depictions of London at night. “I love the mood of his monochrome paintings, and their lightness,” she says. “But then on the other hand I also love Agnes Martin’s resolutely abstract paintings. They're two very different artists, but I like them both.”
Freeney initially set out as an abstract painter. “I would have always been interested in blocks of colour or transitions between one colour and another,” she says. “But then slowly the details started coming into them. I think it was probably when I went down working at the West Cork Art Centre in Skibbereen, after I finished college, that the landscapes started coming into the paintings a little bit, and then just more and more. But the basis of my paintings is still really abstract, even if they have gone more towards representation. It's a contrast, I think, between the two. The paintings are still very much about hard formal shapes. But then they're also about a kind of lyricism, there’s a mood in them as well. So there’s a marriage of both these approaches, I think.”
After Westport, Freeney’s Water’s Edge exhibition will travel to Dublin, where the Paul Kane Gallery has organised a run at the Irish Architectural Archive on Merrion Square in April.
“I’m not sure what I’ll work at next,” she says. “I’m going up to Ballinglen again for two weeks in May. I’ve always been very much a studio painter, I haven’t really done much painting outside, but I wouldn’t mind experimenting with that.”
Ita Freeney, Water’s Edge runs at the Custom House Gallery in Westport, Co Mayo until 3rd March, and the Irish Architectural Archive in Dublin from 18th – 27th April.
Ita Freeney: Water’s Edge art inspired by her views in East Cork Marc O’Sullivan Vallig Irish Examiner 19/2/2024
Where land meets sea is Dublin-born, Cork based Ita Freeney’s focus in these new paintings. The solid shapes of headlands, piers, slipways, roofs, contrast with the airiness and openness of sea and sky. The north Mayo, east Cork and west Waterford coastlines are evoked with confidence in these quiet atmospheric works.
Niall MacMonagle, On Show- Two to View, Sunday Independent, 19/2/2023
Estuarian views by Ita Freeney become meditations on space, light and form, although they are closely based on views from her studio at the city’s edge, and explorations of other locations on Cork Harbour. Muted, almost musical in their delicate sonorities.
Aidan Dunne, The Irish Times, Ticket, 25/5/2019
Light and tone are main concerns in the work of Ita Freeney, whose forms are characteristically minimal but subtly allude to emptiness, emotion and memory. The colour palette of milky greys and blues and the decisive horizontal bands in The Arsenal, for example, are elements she has successfully explored in a whole body of work done in recent years. Her capacity to very particularly evoke that great venue of the Venice Biennale, the arsenale, across the Venetian lagoon, with such minimally descriptive devices is compelling. Spareness is achieved in the process of moving from early pencil drawings, notes and photographs taken in situ before turning to canvas in the studio. Her paintings tend to be free of textural variation.
This economical vocabulary, used to create paintings which tend to be quiet in mood and muted in palette, has developed from an essentially abstract framework.
Horizontal bands have become landscape horizons, rectangles have evolved into sky lights, triangles are now readable as mountains and serpentine curves become paths or rivers. Photographers Elger Esser, whom she admires, and Uta Barth come to mind for the considered spareness of their work. Among painters, Vermeer for his light and the quiet mood of his paintings, Friedrich for the sense of awe in his and Rothko for the softness of his forms, are obvious creative ancestors.
In all the work it is clear that Ita balances concerns with experience, memory, observation and aesthetic formation very evenly but very evocatively. She is a lover of awesome airy spaces and often registers the experience of actually being in these, not usually by having human beings present in the paintings but by the inclusion of human signifiers, like the door in the The Arsenal or the skylight in Echo. Brought up in Dublin city, with a father who is also a painter, her love of going to places of great natural beauty originated with family excursions. Up Ahead for example was inspired by the memory of an outing to Glendalough in County Wicklow. Infused often with implicit memories, the work is perhaps a little too austere to be lyrical but draws in the viewer in a distinctive low key way that is essentially poetic, reflective and entirely unsentimental.
Vera Ryan, Representing Art in Ireland publication, 2008.
The spare paintings in Ita Freeney’s Strata, at the Paul Kane Gallery, do not suggest strata in the conventional sense of the term so much as radical distillation of land or seascape. The discipline of the flat horizon line orders the compositions into expanses above and below. Nothing else much is allowed to intrude though further subdivisions horizontal bands are presumably the clue to the show’s title. Yet these strata seem to be meant in the sense of foreground, middle ground and background, a series of stacked recessive spaces. Freeney is trying to balance an equation that involves minimal form on one side and convincing presence on the other. It’s not an easy thing to do and she is not always successful. But a respectable proportion of her paintings do make it, recalling aspects of the work of artists who have worked in a broadly similar vein, including Simon English, Mary Averill Gillan and the smears paint effects of Gerhard Richter, without being merely or even derivative.
Aidan Dunne, Irish Times, 7/3/2001
Ita Freeney’s paintings, which share the Paul Kane Gallery with the work of Deirdre O’ Brien, also have clear associations with landscape, without being landscapes per se. In compositions marked out with just a few linear divisions, Freeney uses earthy colours in misty, atmospheric masses. To her credit, there’s nothing superfluous in the work, her muted palette is very sound, and while it’s not quite there yet it is very promising.
Aidan Dunne, Irish Times, 3/2/ 1999.
I enjoyed contemplating the Cork Artist Ita Freeney’s abstract compositions at the Paul Kane Gallery: peaceful subtle greys that held the air with quiet assurance.
Dorothy Walker, Sunday Times, 7/02/ 1999