The Traditional Irish Art Gallery

Opens In Sandy Hook

By Kaaren Valenta

Irish-American artist Edmund Sullivan, whose paintings have hung in galleries, museums and private homes around the world, has opened a gallery at 10 Glen Road in Sandy Hook.

Named The Traditional Irish Art Gallery, the space, which for years was the former home of the Family Counseling Center of Newtown, now is filled with Mr Sullivan’s landscapes – intimate, introspective views of Ireland and the world around him.

Almost 30 years ago, while working in a high-paid sales position in New York City, Edmund Sullivan had an epiphany.

“Before that moment in 1973, I had no inkling that I would spend the rest of my life painting Ireland,” Mr Sullivan, 62, said. “I always wanted to be an artist but until that time I was afraid to be poor.”

That year, Mr Sullivan’s mother, who was born in Northern Ireland, went back to Ireland with his sister and brother.

“I didn’t go, but I spent the time that they were gone reading the history of Ireland and about the Great Hunger, the potato famine,” he said. “When they came back and showed me their photos, I quit my job, started researching and painting Ireland.”

He still paints Ireland as it was then, before encroaching modern society and the reforesting of the hills began to change the spectacular views.

“I want to paint this small magnificent country before it changes,” he explains. “I always keep journals and record the Irish experience. I’ve tried to talk to all the old people I could find over there, because the country is changing.”

 Since he moved to Newtown he also has painted scenes of Fairfield Hills, often from vantage points along Wasserman Way.

“I don’t use photos, I always paint right on the spot,” he said. “I am a working artist in the real traditional sense – get it yourself, not from photos.”

To do that, he has made many trips to Ireland. His stunning seascape, “Next Parish, America,” was painted high on a bluff, looking down at a sweep of green fields, gray stone cliffs, a white farmhouse, and the sea. A portion of the painting is featured on the cover of the soon-to-be-published book Forever Green: Ireland Now & Again by Cathal Liam (St Patdraic Press, Summer 2003), which also includes a forward by the artist.

Over a 12-year period Mr Sullivan did more than 30 on-site paintings at the farm of Pat and Mary Murphy, capturing the rugged landscape that juts into the cold Atlantic Ocean.

There are landscapes of farms and cottages with views that flow like a soft patchwork quilt, and small paintings that capture details – a flowered path, a small thatched cottage, a crossroads. Many of Mr Sullivan’s oil paintings are available as artist-enhanced canvas prints and limited edition lithographs.

The artist has spent a large part of his career trying to demystify painting.

“It is part of the human experience to love art, to be spiritual,” he said. “There is community in the different graphic mediums. Take a little paint box, park your car, and paint. All your problems are solved while you are there. You paint from the heart on location; it is all cerebral when you do it from a photo.”

Raised in the Bronx, he served in the Marine Corps, then attended Fordham University in the evenings and classes at the Art Students League in New York City two or three days a week. He worked for IBM and later in sales positions in Florida and New York while painting, as an avocation, along the rugged coast of Maine as well as in the Jamaica and Puerto Rico.

In 1973, the same year his mother returned to his parents’ homeland, he met Alton Tobey, an internationally known artist and illustrator who saw his paintings and urged him to paint full-time. In 1976 Mr Sullivan exhibited his first three year’s of work at a major show in New York City and launched his successful career.

Influenced by his Roman Catholic upbringing and the Jesuits at Fordham, he also became very spiritual.

“I’ve been in a prayer group for ten years and went to Vermont, painted and meditated,” he said. “I had a working gallery and studio in New York but I’ve spent years mostly traveling around and painting in Ireland and New England and other parts of the United States. In 1996 I came to Connecticut, and then I found Newtown. I wanted to open a gallery and this location looked great because it has a big parking lot.”

The gallery, The Traditional Irish Art Gallery, will be open during the second annual Sandy Hook Festival, from 10 am to 3 pm on Saturday, May 3. Regular gallery hours are by appointment, 426-9860. Mr Sullivan also has a website at www.EdmundSullivan.com and a toll-free number, 1-800-445-8734.