This exhibit presents twenty-three etchings by Patrick Pye. They
are part of a collection of etchings by the same artist owned by
the Marian Library / International Marian Research Institute. The
etchings presented in our gallery have been selected to highlight
the presence of Christ the Redeemer in our lives, especially the
meaning of his Passion and Resurrection.
Vita Brevis
The first three etchings (#1-3) show some personal features of the artist's life. His self-portrait as anti-hero (#1) and a taste of Ireland's soft (#2, Bouquet) and stark (#3, Atlantic Island) beauty. Patrick Pye was born of English/Irish parents at Winchester in 1929, the year of the Wall Street crash. His mother, a music teacher, returned to Dublin in 1932; since then Dublin has been his home. He began painting at school under the sculptor Oisin Kelly. He attended the National College of Art in Dublin, and in 1957 won the Mainnie Jellet Scholarship for painting in Ireland. Under this sponsorship he traveled extensively in Europe. It was the prevailing influence of Romanesque Catalan art, seen at the National Museum in Barcelona, that finally turned his attention to Christian iconography. Pye studied stained glass in Maastricht under Albert Troost and has done many windows for churches in Ireland and England. In 1973 he took up etching at the Graphic Studio Dublin where he has continued to work at this medium ever since. He has done important commissions for schools, churches and banks. He was elected to Aosdana in 1981 and to the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1991. His publications include Apples & Angels (Veritas, Dublin 1980) and The Time Gatherer (Four Courts Press, Dublin 1991), a study of the sacred theme in the work of El Greco.
![[The Abandoned Child]](/mary/gallery/images/pye2.gif)
The theme of this exhibit recalls the famous prayer attributed to
St. Patrick (c. 390 - c. 461): "Christ with me, Christ before me,
Christ behind me, Christ in me...." The leitmotif of the Pye
etchings is expressed in Abraham's Sacrifice (#4 - see above) of
which the artist once said: "The only way that I have been able
to come to terms with it is through the perceptions of the inner
dialogue of prophecy and fulfillment of the two Testaments, Old
and New."
![[The Word Within]](/mary/gallery/images/pye1.gif)
The twenty-three etchings were all handprinted at the Graphic
Studio Dublin either by the artist or by Stephen Lawlor, his
colleague and a printer by profession. Most of them are worked
with a steel needle on copper plate with a wax ground. Submerged
in a bath of nitric acid, the acid bites into the copper wherever
the needle has removed the "ground." For printing, the plate is
covered with etching ink which is then gently wiped away leaving
the ink in the intaglio lines.
"The believer (artist or not) finds himself born into an age of
unbelief. We cannot find in this disposition anything other than
the sickness of the age. We cannot, however, put our heads into
the sack of our own belief as though all were well with the
world, as if unbelief were someone else's problem. We must suffer
this sickness ourselves in such a way that the infidel (our
neighbour) realizes that it is his own. The artist suffers this
sickness in a special way. Everywhere the language appropriate to
the faith has been whittled away. There are no longer the words
to talk of spiritual things; indeed, the absence of the words has
become a habit that people no longer notice. In this Rouault
seems to me to be the exemplar for our generation of artists. He
brought the faith to this point: where does man suffer? We have
to begin again by pointing to that area in man where, in his
solitude and pain, he becomes aware of the "disrelation" in his
own self. Men will naturally work to dull the pain and we can
expect men to call it "morbid" and "anti-life," but the believer
will work to keep the pain awake, to kindle the spark of desire
that is concealed therein. I do not know if this is what I do -
or even worry at my failure to do it. I recognise it as what
waits to be done. This is our tuning fork."
