Hannah Mooney: Into The Landscape

By Susan Mansfield, 14.12.2021

Hannah Mooney, Evening Light over Lough, 2019, oil on board, 12.5 x 23.5 cm. Courtesy the Artist and the Scottish Gallery.

Hannah Mooney’s graduate show at Glasgow School of Art in 2017 caused a stir. Here, in the midst of so much conceptualism, was a painter who was deeply concerned with the traditional qualities of painting. Mooney painted landscapes and still lifes and embraced painterly concerns such as tonality and light, and the physicality of paint itself.

She won a battery of prizes, including the Fleming-Wyfold Award and, a little over two years later, was offered a solo exhibition at the Scottish Gallery. By then, she was painting mainly landscapes, en plein air, with a focus on her native Ireland. She has now moved back there, and the loughs, seashores and big skies of the West of Ireland are the predominant subjects in this show.

Like generations of painters before her, Mooney returns often to the same locations - Ballyglass, Scardaune, Lough Carra, Clew Bay - capturing them at different times of day, in different seasons. No landscape is the same twice. Her subject, then, is not only the landscape, but mood, weather and light itself. And something internal, too: these are landscapes she has visited throughout her life, and she explores her relationship with them by painting them.

Her palette is restrained and muted, mainly greys and blues, with the occasional strip of a sandy beach. The dominant feature of these works is the horizontal plane, water and sky conveyed in a series of horizontal fields above and below the horizon. She has an intuitive grasp of how paint conveys colour, from translucent evening-sky blue to the mucky grey-green of a turbulent sea.

This show contains around 80 works, many of them small, some as small as postcards. Almost all are paintings, although there is a handful of exquisite drawings. A few are larger, the most ambitious of them capturing a landscape in low light, when the sky is almost dark, but the last of the light is illuminated on the water.

Her still lifes, usually vases of flowers quite loosely painted, are striking too. Flowers can be single dashes of paint against a dark background, making a dramatic contrast of dark and light. They might almost belong to a previous era altogether, were they not also fresh and immediate.

Mooney is still in her twenties and, she says, still exploring what interests her as an artist. All power to her elbow. At this stage in her career, she is doing exactly what she should be doing: painting, painting, painting. We are fortunate to be able to enjoy the results. 

Hannah Mooney: Into The Landscape is exhibited at the Scottish Gallery, until 23rd December.