On Felim Egan, a short note by Seamus Heaney

Catalogue, Stedelijk Museum, April 1999

 

Felim Egan is attracted to the vanishing point, the far-out place where the visible and invisible meet.

One part of him is in love with geometry, the symmetrical ideal represented by Leonardo1s diagram of Vitruvian Man; but another part is all eyes for what is actually there in front of him.

No wonder he loves and lives by Sandymount Strand, a far-out place in all senses, at once an abstract dream and the solid, sandy shore of Dublin Bay.

The very textures of the canvases tell his story: the ground-stone of the pigment can suggest cloud-cover, the boil of cumulus, but equally it can make you see the grit and swirl of sand, the very down-to-earthness of the thing itself.

When I look for metaphors to represent his vision, I think on the one hand of a lantern room at the top of a lighthouse, a place full of prisms and precision, a Euclidean system; but I also see the offing veiled in mist, the withheld commingling with the revealed, the solitude of a self standing wide open.

 

© Seamus Heaney 1999