She wanted the Blue Sky

Printed area: 40 x 110 cm Edition size 30 Medium: etching and aquatint Price: €1100 (unframed)

Printed area: 38 x 46 cm Edition size 50 Medium: etching and aquatint Price: €500 (unframed)

Her Favourite Place

Printed area: 40 x 50 cm Edition size 30 Medium: etching and aquatint Price: €500 (unframed)

A Place of Comfort and Calm

Printed area: 46 x 38 cm Edition size 50 Medium:etching and aquatint Price: €500 (unframed)

A riotous bunch

Printed area: 46 x 38 cm Edition size 30 Medium: etching and aquatint Price: €500 (unframed)

The Last Hurrah

Printed area: 40 x 50 cm Edition size 30 Medium: etching and aquatint Price: €500 (unframed)

Canal Bank Walk

Printed area: 18 x 24 cm Edition size 50 Medium: etching and aquatint Price: €230 (unframed)

Morning Light, Grand Canal

An excerpt from the opening speech of “Where the Light Falls” by Dr Angela Griffith, Department of History of Art, Trinity College Dublin

Noelle O’Keeffe states utterly and straightforwardly that she loves nature. Here the sunflowers in her garden, at various stages of growth and decay are captured in a myriad of colour and textural mark making. Included in this exhibition is a finely rendered painting titled A Jungle in my Garden, representing a beautifully drawn confluence of drooping flower heads. They appear animated, some set beside vibrant life-affirming greens, others against ochres, yellows and browns that herald the season’s end. The towering sunflower is a symbol of gravity-defying magnificence, and the cycle of life, from flower to seed. Noelle does not over cultivate the plants in her garden (nor does she do so in her work either for that matter), they are not idealised or sentimentalised, but simply are. 

As an artist working in the city, Noelle relishes the restorative power of plant life, and seeks out areas where nature finds the space to thrive within the urban, from her garden to a pond in the Royal Hospital in Donnybrook, to a canal bank.  The night-time print A place of comfort and calm comprises an evenly mediated surface and tonally balanced reflective surface, dappled ever so gently with street light, a visual onomatopoeia.    

The experience of forms and colour through reflection was a subject explored by artists for centuries and it is masterfully captured in Noelle’s large-scale diptych She wanted a Blue Sky. Noelle has described how she was confronted by a startling cold November sky and she was compelled to encapsulate it. To intensify the azure effect, she depicted the sky as a reflection, fragmented by trees and set with in the dense tonal contrasts of wilting pond life and broken vegetation broken. And yet within these decaying moments nature’s life cycle, through a dazzling array of marks, colour and tonal shifts beauty is found, is created. The physical and technical challenge of a work of this scale is immense, stoking the viewers sense of wonder. 

Angela Griffith, September, 2023.