About

I have always loved painting and drawing people and faces so portrait painting became my speciality.

I graduated from Crawford College of Art in Cork with a Diploma in Fine Art in 1987. This complemented my Art Teachers Certificate of 1972.

As part of my research I found a diary of my Dad’s and photos from my Mum that exactly matched the entries. The events of summer 1940 when they first met were nothing extraordinary but the simple story of bicycle rides and bus tours shone a little light on their lives. I felt compelled to express this in painting and so began what was to be a lifelong fascination with old photos and the stories they tell. ​

Despite working full time as an art teacher in Coláiste Choilm Ballincollig over 25 years I always found time for painting and drawing - especially of children.

Retirement also brought new opportunities to fully explore batik for myself after years of developing the craft to a very high standard with Leaving Cert students in school.

Of What is Past


After retirement from full time teaching in 2013,I returned to an idea that had been germinating over the years. This was to produce a series of paintings based on professional photographs taken in Patrick St. Cork 

Over several decades photographers George and Val Healy had captured the ordinary people of Cork going about their day to day business.  My parents had them and my husband Robert also had himself with his mother but I reckoned there had to be one or two of these pictures in every family album in Cork. So I began to ask around and the response was overwhelming with photos coming at me from all over and people more than happy to share their family stories. ​

The pictures were a little window through time to those who walked those same streets before us. Some were posed and smiling and others were caught unawares but in their everyday lives .

I exhibited this series as one entity, representing the street itself with its constant passing and everchanging movement of people.

Old family photographs have a way of touching deep emotions. French philosopher Roland Barthes wrote that detail in these images provokes the greatest emotion, as well as the most intense and personal reaction. He argued that the essence of photography is the implied message: ‘this has been’ but it can also be said that these fleeting moments snatched from the flow of time represent an eternal present.

The concept of people who are at once so familiar to us and yet represent strangers because we did not exist then, is a really strange one but these faded images have now become part of our present. My work concerned the narrative capacity of the photograph and its great power to stir emotions. I consider the paintings as translations of photographs and I endeavoured to recreate that ‘smile for the camera’ moment held forever in that eternal present.

We all have our brief moment in the street and this reminds us, in the words of William Butler Yeats ‘Of what is past, or passing, or to come’.

Áine Andrews