The poetic universe of “Onia”

If it is true that painting is assimilable to a poetic experience, Anne Donnelly's artwork immediately exposes the deep, lyrical roots of an artist whose passion for drawing was first awoken in her youth, years spent in southern Ireland, a land of immense, cloudless skies, as changeable as the wind, on a stud farm in County Carlow, where she moved from Belfast with her family at the age of five.
Her life, brimming with love, has also been full of travel and discovery, starting with the years spent in Madrid studying at the Esquela de Bellas Artes “San Fernando”, where an eagerness to further her knowledge of art led her on many occasions to the Museo del Prado, entranced by the works of her favourite artists, Francisco Goya being the best-loved of all. It was here, in this Mediterranean land, that Anne discovered colour, her own expressiveness and emotional strength, most importantly cobalt blue which was to become her trademark. Returning home to Ireland, she went to live on Leitir Mealláin, a small island in the middle of the Atlantic not far from the Aran Islands, where she spent five months painting in complete harmony with the locals, the farmers and fishermen she depicted in her drawings, but also the sea itself which became a motif to which she would return, time and time again, for inspiration. In 1955, at the age of just twenty-three, she organized her first solo exhibition in Dublin, before embarking on further travels and new experiences, one of which was to prove one of the most momentous in her life. In Paris, where she had gone to study at the Ecole Julienne, she met Carlo Mazzantini, the accalimed writer and poet, who was to remain by her side until his death in Tivoli in 2006. In the French capital, Anne was introduced to the world of nineteenth and twentieth century painting, from the Impressionists to the artists of the historic avant-garde movement, visiting two important retrospective exhibitions of Henry Matisse and Georges Braque, artists who were to prove fundamental in the formation of her own pictorial personality, the former for his expressive use of colour and the latter for his elemental use of form.
Spain was the next port of call in Anne's wanderings, now with Carlo by her side, in her quest for unexplored landscapes in intimate contact with wild nature, which she experienced in six months of austere living in Zahara de los Atunes, near Gibraltar, a medieval fishing village which is home to the enchanted, silent houses populating her delicate, diaphanous paintings.
An existence of sheer simplicity, far from the modernized world, where the only way to get about was on horseback. An expert rider from childhood in her native Ireland, Anne is a horsewoman who relishes long rides astride the most fiery of chargers who, like her, adore the sense of freedom when galloping, the wind in their face, through the beauty of an uncontaminated landscape. After three years in Morocco and more travelling, Anne had the chance to put the fruits of her roving, adventurous life on show in 1962 in Ireland, where she exhibited the many drawings she had accumulated during her variegated travels. Two years later she moved to Italy with her large family (the couple already had three daughters and another was on the way); to Tuscany, near the charming town of Cortona, where she discovered a new cultural homeland which she adopted as her own and where she finally put down roots. Anne and her partner found the verdant hills, artistic treasures and intimate atmosphere of provincial Tuscany to be exactly what they were looking for; here she could paint the waters, the olive trees, but also the great swans and seagulls of the North, casting her mind back to the jagged Atlantic coastline or the unadorned dwellings of Andalusia…
She was fascinated by Italian Renaissance art, the incomparable perfection of form and light, Pier della Francesca in particular taking her by surprise with his extraordinary skill in combining reality with the ideal. The young artist would return again and again to gaze upon his works in rapture: to Monterchi and the “Madonna del parto”, to Arezzo and the series of frescoes entitled “The Legend of the True Cross”, to Sansepolcro, the birthplace of this much-loved Italian artist and treasure trove of some of his masterpieces. These works appear to reflect some of Anne's own ideals of art and life: naturalness, a quest for fundamental essence, a sense of anxiety over infinity, wonder at the beauty of the universe. In Anne's paintings, the contingent world, regulated through her innate sense for compositional balance, unfolds like a musical symphony, transfigured by the myriad of emotions that her life experiences have rooted in her memory.
In 1966 she moved to Rome, a city which, with its metropolitan grandeur, offered an existential dimension far removed from that she had experienced in Tuscany; she was not only thrilled by its history, churches and art from the golden age, but equally entranced by its galleries of contemporary art where she was able to feast upon the creativity and sophistication of artists such as Afro and Burri, inciting her to further experiment the elemental approach already implicit in her linear, clear-cut style. It was a significant period of informal paraphrase, a time when recurrent naturalistic themes cleaved with evocative splashes of colour in white, ochre and various shades of blue. This period of “non representation”, when the object became a mere pretext for exploring an exquisitely intimate reality, was not however an inevitable point of arrival in a gradual process of abstraction from the truth, for Anne it represented a means of capturing purity of form: her abstract paintings, characterized by their strongly material nature and luminous transparency, are the fruits of a critical reinterpretation of visual experience in her quest for an extreme synthesis of expression.
Having permanently moved to the country in 1967, living on a smallholding of olive trees not far from Tivoli, just outside Rome and a step away from the magniloquent archaeological remains of Hadrian's Villa, for more than ten years the artist managed to steer a course between her family commitments and art, never losing sight of the need to remain focused on her work as an artist, in which the motif of nature continued to play the most pivotal role.
Exhibiting in 1984 at “La Margherita” Gallery in Via Giulia, Rome, her paintings revealed an original, mature figuration. Storing up abstract experience as a means of purifying the truth, the language used to disclose the poetic world of “Onia” – Anne in Gaelic – skilfully unfolded as a renewed affirmation of reality, delving into universal meanings in order to savour its most authentic essence.