Joseph Quilty (1914 - 1995)

Joe was born in Limerick on the 7th May 1914 and spent his whole life painting and drawing. He painted landscapes mostly in the Clare and Connemara regions but also painted still life's and landscapes in London, Southwest France, West Cork and Cyprus.

As a young man, he emigrated to England where he studied at Arthur Segal's School of Art and painted with his friend, Gerald Dillon. Throughout his life Joe combined the roles of artist, business man and family man. His reputation as a painter was finally established when he moved back to live in Doorus, near Kinvara in 1978. He realised his ambition to paint full time with the encouragement and support of his wife, Anna. The seventeen years until his death in 1995 was a prolific period marked by four one-man exhibitions at the Kenny Gallery.

The inspiration for much of his work was the Burren region and the enigma of its barrenness and fertility. A man who could paint pictures also with words, he referred to it as his "place of mystery and silence, with eternity punctuated with the plaintive cry of the curlew".

Joe's paintings have been exhibited in Galway, Dublin, London and Toronto and they hang in private collections in the U.S.A., Canada, Germany, France, Switzerland, Spain, Britain and Ireland.