New horizons for Patricia with Berlin exhibition

Patricia Lambert’s art might be technically brilliant but it is obvious she uses her intuition when she draws and paints.

It wasn’t until she left Belfast about 13 years ago to move to Galway, where her husband Paddy works with RTÉ, that her ‘dark side’ came out and she went through a period working on pieces that she believes were far too personal to exhibit publicly.

She moved into her house in Menlo on the week of 9/11 and that sparked off another series of dark-themed pencil drawings. They are of a blank piece of paper on an easel in a conservatory looking out on a bleak landscape. One of them depicts war atrocities outside the window, images from the Afghanistan war, she explains.

“Those images look like a newsreel, probably because of Paddy being a news cameraman – you know, bullets, bombs and funerals – but I also believe I had to leave Belfast for this dark side to come out. Belfast just poured out of me.”

And a few years after coming to Galway, a dear friend, Dara Bradley from Barna, they had come to know and love died after a short illness.“And that’s when I really let it out, the grief. His death stunned me. He had been so welcoming, so encouraging, so inspirational, such a lovely person to befriend here in Galway and suddenly he was gone,” she says still obviously upset by the death.

Patricia, who comes from outside Clonmel in Tipperary, admits that she doesn’t draw “things of beauty” as a rule and went through another period of drawing and painting abandoned tractors, boats, rusty gates in overgrown fields.

She most definitely works according to the way she feels but she also needs her work to work on many levels with the viewer.

And indeed between now and Christmas those viewers are in Berlin where a body of her work is exhibiting in the Irish Embassy there, something she is thrilled about.

“Well, who wouldn’t be, to be exhibited internationally? I was delighted but terrified, but it was a great launch, where we were joined from friends and from Belfast to Galway.

“I haven’t thought of what will happen to those paintings afterwards but I might organise an Irish exhibition, maybe in my own native Clonmel.”And how did Patricia get wall space in Berlin, where the competition between artists for gallery space is huge?

Ann McCormack is the answer. Indeed Ann, who is Patricia’s best friend, is a link in many events of the Tipperary woman’s adult life.They met when they were both studying art in the Crawford Municipal Art College in Cork and Patricia met her husband, Paddy McEntee, RTÉ cameraman in Galway now, at a fancy dress party organised by Ann.

Patricia remembers that she was dressed as an Indian Squaw but Paddy hadn’t bothered to dress as anything.

At that time Paddy worked as a sound recordist with RTÉ in Cork. After their marriage, they moved to Dublin but Paddy, a native of Monaghan, decided to apply for a job in Belfast at the height of the Troubles.

Patricia refers to Ann again. “We got the notion to move to Belfast after visiting Ann there for a weekend. She did her MA in Belfast. We loved the red brick houses and I loved the way the light shone on them and we could hear someone singing opera through the wall and we were intrigued. I hadn’t even thought of the Troubles. I suppose we were naive, well I was.

“But I never felt threatened there. We made lifelong friends there, some of them travelled to Berlin recently for the launch, and I joined an arts club.”

By now Patricia was a homemaker with three young children (today they are aged 27, 22 and 16) but she kept tipping along with her drawing and sketching which she now believes helped her hone her technical skills.

“It was a lot easier getting out a sketch pad and pencils instead of an easel and paints with young children about.”

For more, read this week's Galway City Tribune.