Artists from throughout Munster came to the Rubicon Gallery to view BAIA, some recent paintings by Hughie O'Donoghue this week.
The idea which inspired the paintings, he explained, came from sorting through his father's records and photographs when he died some years ago. Documents like this "are very intimate and . . . are written in a very candid way", he said.
The resulting work is about how we try to remember things. "It's about memory and remembering and how people become anonymous and forgotten rather than remembered," he said.
"People only really die when they are forgotten," he added.
His work, which was also inspired by his father's wartime experiences, is a comment on the idea of "history painting", which in the past tended to focus on the grand events, rather than quite humble things.
Among those painters who came to the show were Bernadette Kiely from Thomastown, Co Kilkenny, Alice Maher from Cahir, Co Tipperary, Paul Mosse, from Co Kilkenny, who is currently showing at the Green on Red Gallery on Dublin's Lombard Street and sculptor Jim Gannon, who is preparing work for inclusion in the Frank Lewis group show in Killarney, next month.
Others who came to the show included Siobhán O'Donoghue, chief executive of Media Desk Ireland and a cousin of the artist. The O'Donoghue family originally came from Barraduv near Killarney in Co Kerry, she explained.
Shivaun O'Casey, daughter of the great playwright, Sean, is currently working on a documentary film about her father. She attended with New York producer Mary Beth Yarrow.
The artist's wife, Clare O'Donoghue, said their two children - Katy (17) and Vinnie (15) - couldn't attend the event because they were in the middle of exams.
Additional work by O'Donoghue relating to the war paintings and entitled Painting Caserta Red, opens in London's Imperial War Museum, on Wednesday and runs for three months. O'Donoghue will give a talk on Thursday June 25th at the Royal Hibernian Academy to coincide with the two shows.
For more information, contact the RHA at 01-661 2558. The show at the Rubicon runs until Saturday, June 28th