Bridget Flinn is a contemporary artist, working mostly in acrylic, painting landscape, urban and rural and still life. She is a full time painter working in her studio in Sandymount, Dublin.

Bridget has exhibited widely in Ireland and is a gallery artist with the Solomon Gallery Dublin. Her work is in private collections worldwide. Public collections include the Office of Pubic Works, Blackrock Hospice and the Northern Ireland Civil Service.

“ The works are made in my studio and the resulting paintings often bear little resemblance to the starting photos and sketches. They evolve with layers of paint, applied by large brushes, palette knife or bits of cardboard. I aim for a loose painterly style, sometimes verging on the abstract”

Bridget Flinn

 

 Bridget Flinn’s paintings occur in that visual nirvana where a painting is simultaneously abstract and figurative. A corresponding dichotomy exists in every element of her work - the free-flow of dripping paint counterpointed by a considered application of pigment, moving forms held in architectonic space, a measured struggle for supremacy between colour and light, classic composition subverted by an internal anarchy.  In her painting this combination of opposites is masked by a subtlety that quietly challenges the viewer’s perception. 

It is not surprising that such a sophisticated approach to painting would work so well with the subject she explores.  Because of their fleeting, ethereal nature, flowers exist on the cusp of form and formlessness and enable the recognition of beauty, which lies at the heart of human consciousness. Throughout the ages flowers have intrigued artists and the resulting work has reflected the creative processes and concerns of painters in every era.

Bridget Flinn had worked as a botanical illustrator and wished, as a painter, to explore this affinity with flowers. In these recent works, she brings a unique and contemporary sensibility to a timeless subject and allows us the opportunity to juxtapose the mystery of painting with the magic of flowers.

Lorcan Walshe