ABSTRACT ARTISTMichael Gemmell

Michael Gemmell was born in 1950 in Coleraine, Co. Derry. He studied at the National College of Art and Design from 1966 to 1968 and at the College of Art in Limerick from 1971 to 1972. As a self employed business man in the 1970s he specialized in Sign Writing, stained glass, gilding, mural painting and interior design before he retired from his business to paint full time. Michael Gemmell used to run a stained-glass studio in Rathmichael, Co. Dublin. And gave up his business to take up his true love for painting around 1992 and his paintings have been his long time dream and now exhibits regularly at the RHA

He has been a firm favourite with the Chimera since day one and his work has been bought home and abroad. We are looking forward to an exhibition in the near future.

Dark, dark is Gemmell’s palette, given to earthy wintry browns, not much green, some blues and whites with the aspect of old snow, frosty and shadowed. And when there are reds they, too, are dark, deep, like the blood of animals on earth or snow. It is as though the landscape itself has been transmogrified by an abstract language all Gemmell’s own, just as Heaney makes it his own in his poems. It is a place shaded by memory and moody musings, possessed of a psychological climate perhaps even more prevalent than the weather, as seen in Gemmell’s oil on linen “The Wicklow Way,” where the big, squareish white and brown form occupies the center of the canvas like a clenched fist.