Lot #33: Nice Old Irish Seaside Oil Painting On Board By Noted Artist Signed John Breakey

Sound clean intact 19" x 15" including 2" wood frame JOHN BREAKEY SRUA 1932 – 2024: “A Painterly Lithographer” John Breakey was one of those rare unique artists, being both an accomplished painter and a renowned print-maker. Born 1932 in Belfast, John studied drawing and painting under the tutelage of Tom Carr RUA (1909-1999) at Belfast College of Art (1953-58). The following year John was fortunate to study at The Slade School of Art in London (1958-60) at a time when lithography was increasingly being taught at art schools, more as a Fine Art discipline by painters such as Ceri Richards, John Piper and William Scott. Ex-Slade student, Stanley Jones (1933-2023) appointed in 1958 as Master Printer at the newly established Curwen Studio, introduced artists and Slade students to a more experimental, painterly approach to lithography. In that spirit, John Breakey developed his own way of working to make prints that evolved from direct interaction on stone - painting, splashing and layering colour from multiple stones to print lithographs of intense vitality. Rooted in the landscape of County Down and more specifically that of the Mournes where he worked at Carnacaville Studio, his lithographs explore the abstract qualities of views seen through dry stone walls and thickets of gorse, heather and grass. Where figures appear, if at all, they are fully integrated into the landscape as in his RUA Diploma work Figures Fused in a Landscape. Creating a dialogue between oil on canvas and ink on paper, his lithographs stand out as strong independent visual statements that few other artists have been able to achieve. Lithography is a physically demanding discipline and in recent years Breakey returned to painting large scale oils such as That Cold Crisp Day at the Beach, where he revisited the abstracted patterns of his immediate locale, expressed in layers of rich, vibrant colours paralleling his printing technique. First exhibiting with the Royal Ulster Academy when he was just 16, John Breakey’s career was long and distinguished, exhibiting widely as an independent artist and in group shows across Ireland and the UK. His work is represented in collections at the Ulster Museum, the Northern Ireland Civil Service, Oxford, Cambridge and London Universities and at the Irish National Self Portrait Collection, Limerick. At his studio, he also worked with a number of artists, printing for David Crone, Neil Shawcross, Malcolm Bennett and Paul Croft. Ever curious about the magical alchemy of printing from stone, major awards and travel grants from Down District Council and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland enabled him to seek out stones drawn by Toulouse Lautrec held in the basement of the Louvre, and to take up a place on the Professional Printer Training Programme at the world renowned Tamarind Institute in Albuquerque in 1990. John’s contribution to British and Irish lithography and painting – very much as a “painterly lithographer” cannot be underestimated. Dimensions: 19" x 15" including 2" wood frame Pickup category timeslot {A}