Born in Galway, Ireland, artist Honor FitzGerald trained at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, and the Crawford Municipal School of Art, Cork.
She has taught at third level at the Munster Institute, Cork, and Athlone IT, and at secondary level in Dublin, Monaghan and Roscommon. She has also held the position of tutor at the Open College of Art at the Thames Valley University.
Honor works primarily with paint but also works with clay, bronze, and glass, depending on the ideas, perceptions, and responses she wishes the work to elicit. The materials she uses are her way of expressing and giving form to the original thought.
Inspired by the human form and natural landscape, she uses drawing – a daily, lifelong habit – as the starting point from which her work evolves.
“Line expresses the transitory nature of an idea and is the principal force. Tone is conscious, colour instinctive.”
Figurative sketches of her immediate surroundings gradually become more abstract through the making process, facilitating the aesthetic process of subtraction, as a mode of ‘thinking through making’.
Honor also draws influence from her background in printmaking, with extensive use of texture, layering and stencilling as well as collage and frottage techniques.
Her work is about how we perceive our world; the fact that we all see life from a different angle.
“For me, the act of painting is often one of capturing the fleeting impression of a moment, a place, an emotion.”
Honor’s paintings combine abstract art and figurative elements in compositions that have strong graphic energy and that evoke a memory or experience. Her visual language is constantly exploring new ways to reflect her interest in the human form and complex human emotions.
Each painting created is an exploration in meaning and material through her visual language. The titles of her works often reflect the thoughts behind or beside the work. Place is important as she responds to form in landscape and surroundings.
“Inspiration comes from my way of looking at life. I think visually and express myself through my making.”
She has exhibited regularly for more than 40 years in Ireland, the United Kingdom and Germany, and her work can be found in private and public collections in Ireland, the USA, Germany, Canada, Australia and elsewhere in the world.
Honor FitzGerald is a member of the WAR (Working Artists Roscommon) and VAI (Visual Artists Ireland).
