Meet Laura Gibney at Art Upstairs on Saturday 4th or Saturday 11th August from 2.00pm to 5.30pm.

Laura Gibney

Laura Gibney was born in Dublin in 1951. She graduated from the National College of Art and Design in 1972 and commenced her career as an art teacher the following year. She taught art at post-primary level until 2006 and also tutored in oil painting at night class during those years. She was also involved with book and magazine illustration.

Laura stopped teaching in order to devote more time to her own artistic development and since February 2006 she lives in Gusserane in Co. Wexford where she finds much local inspiration to develop her love of art and painting.

She is a mixed media artist, as well as working with traditonal oils, pastels and acrylics, she also specialises in pencil and line drawing.

Mostly inspired by the rugged countryside of the Wexford coastline, the main subjects of her work are landscapes and seascapes, clouds and skies, from the hills and mountains, to the cliffs and harbours of her new home base. Working mainly in oils, her paintings capture the essence of the wild, unspoilt beauty of the coast in swathes of vivid colour laid on with bold brush and palette strokes. She also produces pictures in

watercolour. Her paintings are the result of many hours spent observing the effects of changing weather patterns and light on the land, sea and sky of this dramatic part of Ireland.

Her work has been commissioned by both the private and corporate sectors and currently hangs in collections in Ireland, the United Kingdom, Italy, Germany and the United States.

Her most recent exhibition, “Coastal Odyssey” at the Cockleshell Gallery in Duncannon, Co. Wexford was reviewed in the New Ross Echo by Brendan Keane who described her work as ‘having a photographic quality which is spectacular and boasts an incredible level of detail creating an air of authenticity which is all too lacking in the work of some modern-day artist’. “Coastal Odyssey” is now showing at Art Upstairs.