Paintings : Still Life

While Carmel Mooney's landscape paintings and her volcanic series may sometimes veer towards abstraction, all of her work is in fact deeply rooted in close observation and an intimate knowledge of the subject. Nowhere is this more evident than in her still life work, a discipline that she has returned to repeatedly over the past 20 years.

Drawing has always been an important part of the painting process for Carmel Mooney; long before the canvas has been primed, she will work with the image across a series of drawings:

"... because if you draw, you really have to look at something. You really have to observe it. In doing that - making a lot of drawings - you get to know it. You only think you know the shape of something until you draw it."

This meticulous attention to detail, even - or rather, particularly - at the earliest stages of the painting process, was always evident in Carmel's work. As the art critic Cyril Barrett observes in his 1993 essay 'Light and Space' (reproduced in the Gandon Editions book on Carmel Mooney), when as a student Carmel was presented with plastic oranges to copy for an exam she pursuaded the porter to go out and buy real ones.

In 1986 Carmel visited Tuscany and was immediately drawn to the local sunflowers. Three years later, motivated to bring more colour into her work, she returned to northern Italy and produced the 'Sunflowers, Tuscany' series of still life paintings. Her passion for this subject was reignited in on a subsequent visit to Sicily, following which she produced the 'Sunflowers, Sicily' series.