Felim Egan obituary: One of Ireland’s leading contemporary artists

Born: November 8th, 1952

Died: November 19th, 2020

Felim Egan, who has died following a short illness, was one of Ireland’s leading contemporary artists. Best known for his restrained abstract paintings, Egan exhibited widely across Europe with major exhibitions at the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester, the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. He represented Ireland at the Paris Biennale in France in 1981 and at the Sao Paulo Biennial in Brazil in 1985. He won the prestigious Unesco international prize for painting in Paris in its inaugural year of 1993.

Egan’s work hangs in numerous public collections, including the Ulster Museum in Belfast, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Gallery of Ireland, IMMA, the Arts Council of Ireland and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. The Office of Public Works, Trinity College Dublin and the European Parliament also have paintings by Egan in their collections.

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He is best known for his monochromatic paintings marked with ghostly geometrical shapes. He had a technique of building up colour by applying layer after layer of thin acrylic mixed with powdered stone. He worked on his paintings on a flat table, viewing the work from all angles, watching paint change intensity and colour as it soaked into and dried on the linen or canvas.

“This unknown part of the process can create ‘happy’ incidents or problems to resolve, beyond my immediate control, creating a freedom with the work,” he said. He described himself as immersed in a world of “soft squares and wobbly circles, plotted arbitrarily as the stars appear to be, working on a way to make these incongruous icons and fragments blend but never completely . . . in many ways, a reflection of the chaotic world we live in, trying to make a sense of it all through the language of painting”.

Commercially successful early in his career, his canvases were popular in hotel lobbies and his prints and watercolours graced the walls of popular restaurants in Dublin. Although best known for his paintings, Egan also completed some three-dimensional works, notably a series of tall wooden pedestals on which handfuls of pebbles, stones and other materials were poised on the top.

Initially, he was represented by the Oliver Dowling Gallery in Dublin and later by the Kerlin Gallery and the Cross Gallery. In London, he had several solo exhibitions at the Purdy Hicks Gallery. He taught painting at the National College of Art and Design for a time and became a member of Aosdána, the association of Irish artists, in 1986.

Egan’s paintings were sometimes described as abstracted landscapes or abstracted seascapes with a liminal quality that his neighbour, the late poet Seamus Heaney, described as “a balance of shifting brilliances”.

Egan was a thin, softly spoken man with a dark sense of humour. He had an eclectic taste in music and listened to classical, folk and pop music as he worked. Interested in wall surfaces, both new and ancient, he was also inspired by Celtic carving dating from 3,500 BC which he said linked Ireland with France, Spain, Portugal and eastwards to the Mesopotamian Empire. A seasoned traveller, he visited many of these places to study their cross-cultural heritage.

Egan was born in an orphanage on the Inishowen peninsula in Donegal and was adopted at the age of two by Martin Egan from Galway and his wife Maisie (née Harte) from Donegal. The family – with Felim’s older sister, Maura – lived in Strabane, Co Tyrone, where his father ran a drapery store and his mother a tobacco and sweet shop.

Following primary school in Strabane, Egan attended St Columb’s College in Derry. He didn’t settle well there and returned to St Colman’s High School in Strabane where a teacher noticed his artistic talent and encouraged him to pursue art. He then completed a foundation course in Belfast School of Art in 1971 and continued his studies at the Portsmouth Polytechnic. Thereafter, he moved to London to study at the Slade School of Fine Art from 1975 to 1977.

Impacted by growing up in Northern Ireland during the Troubles and being Irish in Britain at a time when it wasn’t popular, Egan immersed himself in traditional Irish music, learning to play the bodhrán, the fiddle and the Irish flute. At the time, Strabane-born musician Paul Brady – also living in London – was one of his friends. He also had a lifelong friendship with the actor Stephen Rea.

Following his time in London, Egan lived in Dublin renting a studio in Temple Bar and living in Ballsbridge and later Rathmines. A scholarship to study art at the British School at Rome brought him to Italy for a year in 1980.

In 1993, he married Scottish artist Janet Pierce and became the stepfather to her three children. The family lived in Edinburgh for five years before moving back to live by the sea in Sandymount, Dublin. Inspired by the long horizons, big skies, empty sands and the sea, Egan often walked the shore accompanied by his dogs. Egan and Pierce separated in the mid-2000s.

In 2005, Egan bought a property in Tavira on Portugal’s Algarve coast. He dividing his time between there and his Dublin apartment on Hanover Quay. He loved the street life of Portugal and the yellows, blues and whites of the coastal Portuguese streetscapes influenced his later paintings.

Given the circumstances of his birth, he had a strong empathy for orphans and refugees. In 2011, he joined the MV Saoirse “Freedom Flotilla” to protest against the blockade on Gaza. The protesters were arrested and imprisoned in Israel for a week before being released. Egan later returned to Gaza to work with artists there and held art workshops for children. He curated the exhibition of art and photographs by Palestinian artists, Windows into Gaza, which toured Ireland from 2013 to 2014.

In 2015, he completed an installation of paintings at Deutsche Bank headquarters in Dublin. In 2019, he moved out of Dublin to live in the seaside town of Greystones, Co Wicklow, where he converted rooms in his new home into a studio. He loved being by the sea and was looking forward to painting in these new surroundings.

Felim Egan is survived by his sister, Maura Shannon, his nephew, Barry, and his cousin and close friend, Mary Harte.