About

Maura Fahy was born in the picturesque village of Clonbur, Co. Galway, which is situated between Lough Mask and Lough Corrib. She has dedicated her entire life to Art. From a young age, she taught herself to draw and paint. In her earlier work, Maura depicted scenes from her family’s pub.

She maintained a keen interest in art through her school years. In secondary school, she was only one of two students to take art as her specialist subject. It was here she realised that her future lay in creating art. Maura furthered her studies in Craft at Sligo Institute of Technology. From there, she qualified with a first class honours diploma in Art Teaching at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin.

In 1981, she began her career as an art teacher at the Christian Brothers School (later named Colaiste Choilm) in Tullamore, Co. Offaly. For twenty years she taught art to students in the Junior and Senior cycles. In 2001, she made the decision to change career and become a full time artist. She has also developed her own art studio, ‘Papillon’, in Lughill, Durrow, Tullamore. Her unique style and strong vibrant colours resonate on a personal level with those who view her paintings.

Her work is abstract in nature and is inspired by our natural surroundings and spiritual influences. Maura uses oil paints and sand in many of her pieces to create unusual images with rough textures

Using her own vibrant and vigorous style, she creates pictures that are rich in thickly applied colour- to which she often adds sand to make it thicker- and various textures. The pictures reveal the artist’s intense, deep feeling of connection to the landscape and the Irish countryside- especially the West coast- but also to the spiritual and mystical dimension to the country where handed-down legends, stories and fairytales are still alive in the artist’s country.

Blending influences from her spirituality with those from nature, and with sensitivity and harmony, Fahy paints works in which familiar places are turned into timeless landscapes and shrouded in a veil of mystery.

She draws on her love of her own countryside, where the landscapes and nature as a whole are extraordinary, and on Irish culture in which a thread of mysticism is always present. Maura Fahy tells of her own emotions, her memories and her dreams, creating the special, enchanted atmosphere, which surrounds her pictures and distinguishes them

Through their strong visual impact, Maura Fahy’s paintings cannot be categorised under a single heading; over and above the figurative, abstract and narrative aspects, the mystical and the symbolic prevail. Enthralled, in the artist’s canvas, organised with force and energy, we find the product of impulses and journey of her mind: This, while it may dream, is nevertheless always alert to natural scenes with their many possibilities.