TP Flanagan, one of generation's finest landscape artists, dies

THE ARTIST TP Flanagan, one of the finest landscape painters of his generation, died suddenly on Tuesday evening.

Born in Enniskillen, he celebrated his 80th birthday last year and in June was awarded a doctorate of fine art by the University of Ulster.

He was without question the pre-eminent Irish watercolourist of the latter half of the 20th century. His command of the medium was exceptional by any standard and his signature style, with compositions of great elegance and poise built from flurries of fast, calligraphic brush-strokes, was distinctive.

He is particularly associated with three counties: his native Fermanagh, Sligo and Donegal and all feature prominently in his work. As a child he spent time in Sligo with an aunt who ran a school of needlework at Lissadell House and it was she who first encouraged him to paint.

He also benefited from the teaching of the artist Kathleen Bridle, who prompted him to go to Belfast College of Art.

The landscape of Lissadell demesne, as filtered through the poetic sensibility of WB Yeats, was a formative influence and remained a constant. He also brilliantly evoked the low-lying, watery terrain of south Fermanagh.

Donegal became important to him in the 1960s when he and his wife Sheelagh went on holiday with Seamus and Marie Heaney to Gortahork.

It marked a turning point for both artist and poet and they remained close friends. Heaney's landmark poem Bogland, which concludes his book Door into the Dark, is dedicated to Flanagan and was inspired by Flanagan's painting Boglands for Seamus Heaney.

Marie Heaney was one of Flanagan’s pupils at St Mary’s College of Education, where he taught for 28 years from 1954 and was head of the art department.

He exhibited regularly from 1959, north and south of the Border, at the Tom Caldwell Gallery in Belfast and at the David Hendriks and then the Taylor galleries in Dublin.

As well as dedicating poems to him, Heaney has written about his work on several occasions and memorably dubbed him “a haunter of demesne and ditchback” in a 1971 catalogue introduction.