The Welsh-born painter, Nancy Wynne-Jones, who has died aged 83 on November the 9th found in Cork, to which she moved to in 1972, Wicklow, in which she settled 1988, and especially my own birth place of Mayo, which as far as I know she regularly visited, the inspiration that that she needed to become one of foremost landscape painters of the last two and half decades.
Her near-abstract of scenes in and around the Mayo’s Nephin mountains are wonderfully evocative of places that can be vibrant and gloomy at almost one and the same time. I have to admit that I’m only familiar with her paintings in reproduction, but even in reproductions you can see what the poet Seamus Heaney was was getting at when he said that the paintings were “place and palette and spirit all equal”.
David Whittaker in his obituary in The Guardian today probably devotes too much of the space he’s been allotted to her life, the friends and acquaintances she made and too little to evaluating the work with which the general reader will be unfamiliar.
Bog with Nephin by Nancy Wynne-Jones
Kevin Cryan's online diary 