Jack Pakenham RUA

Jack Pakenham was born in Dublin in 1938 but has lived in Northern Ireland since 1939. He graduated from Queen's University in French, Spanish and Philosophy in 1959. He spent the winter of 59/60 writing and painting in the Balearic Island of Ibiza. He later lived in Swanage, Dorset. He did teacher-training in Stranmillis College in 1960/61 and went on to teach English at Ashfield Boys' Secondary School, Belfast. He was Head of English Department between 1971-1990. He now works as a full time painter.

Pakenham was one of a group of artists to take inspiration from the Northern Ireland troubles in the 1970's, expressing horror of all paramilitary forces in his entirely personal way.

'My work has always been an attempt to convey in visual terms some aspects of the Human Drama to give a visual vocabulary to psychological states such as anxiety, or depression, to portray distrust, bigotry, hatred, tenderness all within imagined theatrical situations which have multiple readings. This is the theatre of Enigma first explored in the work of Magritte and di Chirico, to which the spectator must bring his, or her, own interpretations, which can change at every new reading. For quite a few years this drama was dominated by the political scene in N.Ireland, taking on board the violence, the bombings, the maimings, the intimidation, the "turn a blind eye" attitudes of rabble-rousing politicians with their hypocrisy, bigotry, and hatred. Since the Ceasefires and the reduction of the more obvious trapping of this violence, some of the anger portrayed in these paintings has disappeared and the work has become more lyrical incorporating visited landscapes such as Southern Spain, Donegal, the Mojave Desert with its Native American artefacts and petraglyphs along with a re-assessment of early work which embraced landscape-based abstraction, head studpies etc. I like to think of my work as continuing the tradition of figurative poetic narrative, established by Northern Artsits - Colin Middleton, Dan O'Neill and Gerard Dillon.'