The Arts Council of Northern Ireland has learned with great regret of the death of one of Northern Ireland’s foremost artists, TP Flanagan, who has passed away at the age of 81.
Terence Philip Flanagan was born in Enniskillen in 1929, though he spent much of his childhood in Sligo. The distinctive landscapes of Fermanagh, Sligo and Donegal would become the core of his subject matter as a landscape painter. He attended St. Michael’s Presentation Brothers Grammar School and Enniskillen Technical College, and was introduced to the art of watercolour painting in his late teens by the Irish portrait and landscape painter, Kathleen Bridle. TP went on to study at the Belfast College of Art from 1949 to 1953. He then taught at St. Mary’s College of Further Education, remaining there for 28 years and eventually becoming Head of the Art Department, until his retirement in 1983.
In these early years, he also served his artistic apprenticeship with Basil Blackshaw, took instruction from Colin Middleton and befriended and became a protégé of poet and political activist, John Hewitt.
He began exhibiting his paintings in 1958, and the Arts Council’s involvement with TP begins in 1961 when the Arts Council exhibited his first solo show. He went on to exhibit in the major galleries throughout these islands and much further afield, and his work is represented in many major collections, including the Ulster Museum, IMMA, Hugh Lane, and the Arts Council. The Arts Council hosted a major retrospective exhibition in 1977 of Flanagan’s work from 1967 to 1977. It would be fifteen years before his next major retrospective, of works from 1945 to 1995, at the Ulster Museum in 1995.
Flanagan’s involvement with the Arts Council continued over many years, serving for over 20 years from 1962 to 1986 as a member of the Visual Arts Advisory Committee, over which he became Vice-chair in 1966 and Chair in 1967. TP was elected an academician of the Royal Ulster Academy in 1964, becoming its president from 1977 to 1983. He received the academy’s gold medal in 1976 and he became a member of the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1983. He remained President of the Belfast Arts Club. TP was awarded an honorary doctorate of fine art from the University of Ulster last year in recognition of outstanding services to art.
Artistically, TP Flanagan follows a tradition of landscape painters in Ireland and ranks among the best of all time. Through his delicate, individualistic style, he developed an unrivalled painterly response to the landscape he loved. As Brian Kennedy, author of a forthcoming book on the artist, says of Flanagan in his 1995 Ulster Museum catalogue, “his work is always recognisable as his own, and he can – indeed to understand him he must – be defined in terms of his own aesthetic.” Kennedy acknowledges that, technically, as a watercolourist, TP Flanagan was unsurpassed in his time.
Rosemary Kelly, Chairman of the Arts Council, paid tribute: “Throughout his long and very distinguished career, TP Flanagan established himself as one of the most illustrious and inimitable Irish painters of his generation. In a long and rich tradition of landscape painting in Ireland, he ranks amongst the best. His place in Irish art history is assured.”
Seamus Heaney, a life-long friend of the artist, dedicated his 1969 poem ‘Bogland’, considered by many to be the poet’s watershed poem, to TP Flanagan. The poem was, in turn, inspired by the artist’s painting ‘Boglands for Seamus Heaney’. Speaking at a special reception held at the Arts Council last March in honour of the artist’s lifetime contribution to the arts, Heaney, paid this tribute:
“TP Flanagan has been a uniquely accomplished and cherished presence in a generation of Irish artists who have secured an honoured place for themselves in the overall history of Irish art. He has been faithful to an ancient artistic impulse which is to bear witness to the wonder of the world and give glory to it, to make it firm by giving it form. His vision of the landscapes of Fermanagh and Sligo is as unmistakably his own as Paul Henry’s Vision of Connemara, and his paintings of west Donegal have a stark lyric power and deep personal significance for me.”
TP Flanagan leaves behind a widow, Sheelagh and three children, Philip, Catherine and Anthony.
