Changing Galway

A major retrospective of the paintings, drawings, and watercolours of Derek Biddulph, who has now reached that stage in his career when the body of work he has created summons forth a 'retrospective', which my dictionary defines as "a looking back in time". As an artist who has worked almost exclusively in Galway for nearly half a century, Derek has been the sensitive chronicler of a place he has adopted as his own, expressing Galway's ever-changing moods, through the course of a day and through the seasons. He has traced the stages of its love affair with the river and the bay and the 'lost' islands upon which it has been erected; he has also been a careful and, it must be added, occasionally a melancholy - even sometimes an outraged - recorder of the more recent 'Cromwellian' depredations inflicted upon its noble old face.

Furthermore, Derek's images of Galway can be found on the walls of many private houses and public establishments all over the town, eloquent testimony to the fact that people - and not only Galway people - recognise in his work a faithfulness to what the poet and artist David Jones called "the actually known and loved", along with an appreciation of his skill in imaginatively portraying the familiar in such a way that we see it again with fresh vision.

But through it all, through all the thousands of images - in oil, watercolour, pen and pencil - that he has made of Galway, there runs an irresistible enthusiasm. He has even, in the last few years, come to perceive a new kind of beauty in the flush of bright colours that adorn some of the newest buildings. Derek Biddulph's love affair with Galway is being conducted, even after almost five decades, with all the passionate ardour of a young man unable to believe how lucky he is such a rare beauty condescends to speak to him.

The artist Winifred Nicholson, whose paintings of flowers are so extraordinarily beautiful, once wrote that "the eyes of one kind of painter look outward. The eyes of another look inward to the recollections that dwell in the recesses of the mind". Derek Biddulph is a painter who combines both approaches; he has a sharp and discerning eye for the natural and the man-made world, but his impressions of it are fed by the fountains of recollection. He is, as I noted earlier, a celebrant of place and time. As you look around the gallery at the various images he has made, think of each of them as stages along a pathway, momentary 'fixes' taken by a man on a long and exciting journey, a journey that takes 'time' and transforms it into images through which we, the viewers, can glimpse something of the beauty he has seen in a place - Galway - known and loved by both us and the artist.

The Galway Advertiser - 22 January, 1998