Artists gathered to applaud and admire the work of Patrick Pye, RHA at the Jorgensen Fine Art gallery on Molesworth Street this week.
"I was always oriented towards religion and it's a wonderful thing to fire the imagination, and I am an imaginative painter," said Pye, whose work is largely concerned with religious themes. "I don't paint from nature. It's all out of my head."
"I only grew into it slowly," he said. "I did landscapes mostly originally, imaginative landscapes." But, he continued, "if you read the Bible, the images stay with you and they grow within you. And they have to be treated differently as you grow older. I have to revisit them."
The image which he has revisited more than any other is the transfiguration of Christ, he said, pointing to number 17 in the collection, entitled The Glory Foretold.
According to Father Tom Stack, who opened the show, Pye's work "confronts us with a unique energy, and it communicates a felling of freshness and confidence. His work imparts an experience of hope".
Pye's themes and subjects "have a public or communal resonance" and this, he said, is "unusual in an era that is ideologically private in its conceits". Stack, whose book on Patrick Kavanagh, No Earthly Estate, was published by Columba Press last year, compared Pye to the Monaghan poet, whose work was also "grounded in the Christian story".
Camille Souter was among those at the show, along with other painters such as Seán Hillen, Liam Belton, John Dunne and Jackie Stanley, whose own show opens next week at Dublin's Hallward Gallery. Pye's work, who was born in 1929, is "just inspirational", said Hillen. "He's just getting better and better. It's stupendous religious art."
Pye's wife, Nóirín, and their daughters, Naoise and Róisín, were also at the show, which runs until the end of October.