Donald Teskey has won this year’s RCSI Art Award, in association with the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) and The Irish Times, for his oil on canvas piece titled Orchestral II.
The painting is inspired by a series of work based on aspects of a riverbank. During summertime, the leaves of the wildflower butterbur grow in harmonious clusters by the banks of river Dodder in south Dublin. The green leafy pad arrangement across the riverbank became Teskey’s inspiration for this piece.
“The Dodder river runs close to my studio, and I have always been drawn to it. Since 2017, I started looking seriously at the river and the beautiful patterns created by the butterbur leaves during summer. The patterns contrasted with the water flowing from mountains, which together created a beautiful composition,” he said.
The painting focuses closely on the summer foliage, depicting the plants in an abstract way, something Teskey has been meaning to do for a long time.
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“The craft behind this painting is the feeling of being there and capturing nature in an abstract way. There was a lot of build up and scrapping during the whole process, symbolising nature.”
“It takes days or sometimes weeks to formulate the idea. It’s a process from the thinking stage, to drawing and looking, then sketching, finding ideas and going out with camera to take photos,” said Teskey during the award ceremony.
The Limerick-born artist received the RCSI Silver Medal along with €5,000 to progress his practice and a €10,000 commission for a new piece for RCSI’s collection at the award ceremony on Wednesday.
The painting won from a shortlist of five pieces that were chosen among 515 works displayed during the 194th RHA Annual Exhibition, Ireland’s largest and longest running visual art exhibition.
Now in its ninth year, the RCSI Art Award celebrates associations between art, medicine and wellbeing.
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