One River, One Creek

February 1 to March 15, 2018

Oliver Sears Gallery, Dublin, 1st February to 15th March 2018. One River, One Creek, is an exhibition of new works by Donald Teskey.

In the summer of 2017 Teskey began work on a series of paintings that looked at both the intimate elements of the riverbank as well as the broader view. The River Dodder runs at the back of Teskey’s studio in Dublin’s south city. The flora and fauna of this particular stretch of river have interested Teskey for many years. The local perspective (local to the perspective of the artist’s home) allows Teskey to countermand the challenge of plein air painting on the rugged coastline of Mayo and Sligo in order to decode a natural world on his doorstep. This series is reinforced by One Creek, a group of paintings that emerged during the artist’s residency at Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania in the autumn of 2017. Crum Creek passes through the woodlands of Swarthmore, a slow moving waterway with its own sense of wilderness.

Donald Teskey has spent a lifetime embedded in the environment that he depicts. Here, two semi domesticated river systems, each with its own unique micro climate fall under his gaze and reappear on canvas and on paper, perfectly measured observations of time and place.