Flanagan, Terence Philip ('T. P.'; 'Terry') (1929–2011), painter, was born 15 August 1929 at 18 The Hollow, Enniskillen, Co. Fermanagh, the eldest among four sons and three daughters of William Flanagan and his wife Margaret (née Maguire). His father held a series of clerical jobs in and near the town (his own father was civil bill officer of Fermanagh County Court); a heavy drinker, amid family tensions he moved alone to Dublin (mid 1930s), where he was soon joined by his wife, who left their three children (Terry and two sisters, who had little contact with the four younger siblings born in ensuing years) in the care of two unmarried paternal aunts in Enniskillen. Flanagan was educated locally by the Presentation brothers at St Michael's elementary and grammar schools (1936–49). Summer holidays were spent in Co. Sligo, where his aunts owned a cottage near Lissadell House, and one of them ran a school of needlework and lacemaking for local girls on the Gore-Booth estate. His interest in art being encouraged by his aunts, while still a schoolboy he took lessons under Kathleen Bridle (qv), privately and in her evening classes in drawing and painting at Enniskillen technical college (1943–9). Also developing enthusiasms for literature and drama, in his adolescence Flanagan began writing stories and poems, some of which were published or broadcast on radio; he continued to publish poetry in literary magazines into the 1960s.
Arriving in Belfast to read English at QUB, upon visiting the city's museum and art gallery Flanagan experienced an epiphanic moment, instantly realising that his true desire was to paint. Securing permission to transfer his county council scholarship, he entered Belfast College of Art (BCA) (1949–53), where, influenced by the teaching of Romeo Charles Toogood (1902–66), he abandoned Bridle's practice of spontaneous execution of a finished landscape in the field directly from the subject, and adopted his lifelong working method of making detailed preliminary drawings of a subject, followed by patient, considered rendering of a finished picture in the studio, removed from the original visual experience.
After a year as a part-time art teacher in convent schools in Lisburn and Ballynahinch, Co. Down, supplemented by some lecturing in drawing and anatomy at BCA (1953–4), Flanagan was appointed full-time lecturer in art at St Mary's College of Education, Belfast (1954–83), a teacher training college for women, serving as head of department from 1965. His fundamentally academic approach to teaching emphasised the development of traditional drawing skills, even if the artist eventually adopted an experimental style. He urged students to inquire broadly in all branches of learning and the arts, because a compelling painting that extends 'the viewer's experience' must not only exhibit an adroit technique but also embody ideas (Ir. Times, 14 August 1976).
Alongside his teaching, Flanagan pursued his own career as a professional painter. He began exhibiting in group shows of the Art Students' Union at BCA in the early 1950s, and regularly from 1954 at the Royal Ulster Academy of Arts. He painted sets for Belfast's Lyric Theatre (1950s), thereby meeting his future wife, Sheelagh Garvin, a Lyric actress; marrying in 1959, they had two sons and one daughter. His first solo show was at Belfast's Piccolo Gallery (1958). Thereafter, he exhibited in many one-person and group shows in both Northern Ireland and the Republic, represented intermittently at the Royal Hibernian Academy from 1965. His only appearance at the Royal Academy, London, was in 1958. A formative experience was his long friendship, from the early 1950s, with John Hewitt (qv), who influenced his ideas about art and literature, and fortified his confidence in his own art.
In his early career Flanagan concentrated on still life, especially flower studies, and hesitated to paint landscapes, believing the genre to be so hackneyed by multiple renditions that it offered little else to express in an original fashion. The motivation to try his own hand at landscape derived from the early days of his close, lifelong friendship with poet Seamus Heaney (1939–2013), whom he met in 1960 when Heaney was a trainee teacher at St Mary's fraternal college for male students. Upon Heaney's suggestion that he keep a journal of his childhood memories of Lissadell, Flanagan revisited the locale and made some quick pastel drawings of the house and demesne to assist his memory, but soon felt compelled to paint, rather than write down, his memories of the place. Over several years he executed some two dozen drawings, oils and watercolours, evoking memories of Lissadell in its last stages as a working estate – wild nature reclaiming the terrain; the steady, inexorable decay of an imposed classical order – in a low-toned, elegiac palette.
These Lissadell works of 1960–65 constitute the first of the many themed series that characterise Flanagan's oeuvre, each series comprising a sequence of pictures treating a particular locale or still-life subject. Sequential painting allowed Flanagan to treat a landscape from multiple viewpoints and in varying light, seasons and weathers. More significantly, it allowed him to explore different thematic ideas about a subject, and different dimensions and nuances of an idea, to a vastly greater extent than could be done in a single painting. Rarely working on a single thematic sequence at any one time, Flanagan revisited many of his themes at intervals over the years.
Flanagan's second series of the early 1960s was inspired by a holiday on Lough Erne, during which he made drawings that were later worked into finished studio paintings. Most famous of this Lough Erne series was 'Autumn lough' (1961; oil on board; Ulster Museum), a monochromatic treatment of simplified, semi-cubist forms, intended to capture the mood of the scene. In 1962 Flanagan met the influential Dublin gallery owner David Hendriks (d. 1983), who became his Dublin agent, and with whom he exhibited biennially into the mid 1980s. His first exhibition with Hendriks comprised some thirty of the Lissadell and Lough Erne paintings (March 1964).
Flanagan discovered the austere landscapes of north Co. Donegal during two separate holidays in Gortahork (summer and autumn 1966), the latter in Heaney's company. After years painting 'the moist contours of Fermanagh, and the old, romantic woods of Lissadell', he found 'an invigorating alternative' in Donegal's barren bogs, boulder-strewn forelands, windswept dunes and dank salt flats (Kennedy (1995), 30–34). The resultant Gortahork series (late 1960s) signified his attainment of full stylistic and conceptual maturity, as he produced a body of work that expressed a unique personal vision in an assured, authoritative hand. Employing low tonal values and a dark, restricted palette, he captured the bleak savagery of the landscape in simple, highly abstracted forms, briskly executed in a bold, gestural fashion. In 'Boglands' (1967; acrylic and pastel on board), a moody work dedicated to Heaney, Flanagan conveyed a profound sense of the magnitude of the deep, murky, subterranean past submerged beneath the outer surface of things – a theme explored in Heaney's reciprocating poem, 'Bogland' (1969). A subset of the Gortahork series was Flanagan's 'stream through sand' pictures, each depicting a rivulet bleeding across a beach into the sea.
Resisting such terms as 'abstract', 'narrative' and 'representational', Flanagan held that all narrative painting is a representation of a thing, and not the thing itself; hence, all painting has an element of abstraction, and there is no such thing as a totally narrative or totally abstract painting. Furthermore, his own approach to a landscape was never merely observational, but always a distillation of his thoughts, feelings and memories of a place, executed in a greater or lesser degree of abstraction. While prolific and proficient in both oils and acrylics, Flanagan became best known and esteemed for his watercolours. Though introduced to the medium by Bridle, for years he employed it chiefly for preliminary sketching. Only after 1970 did he employ watercolour extensively for finished paintings, firstly in a sequence revisiting the Lissadell theme. The atmospheric exterior 'Lissadell House' (1971) was a masterly display of conception and technique, with skilfully applied washes and sensitivity to the painted surface. It was exhibited, along with an earlier Lissadell interior in oils, 'Bow drawing room' (1961), in the 1971 Rosc exhibition in Dublin.
In 1968 Flanagan purchased a cottage in Roughra, a townland in southwest Donegal, as a holiday home, eventually extended with an attached studio. In his 'Roughra hearth' sequence, begun in 1973 and largely comprising watercolours, he depicted the cottage's turf-burning stone fireplace with rotating crane, often including such still life as cooking utensils and found items; for Flanagan, the hearth evoked the cottage's previous occupants. A later Roughra sequence comprised four acrylics on canvas depicting winter landscapes (1976).
Flanagan asserted that Irish artists, rather than aping fashionable, non-narrative international idioms, should embrace the verbal tradition that is central to Irish culture, and create images that aimed to parallel, not to mirror, a written text. The pronounced literary current running throughout his oeuvre is paramount in two themed series begun in 1975, in which painted images share the picture surface with scraps of writing. Each personal experience in the 'pages from a summer diary' series is recorded in an image and a short handwritten notation. In the 'emigrants' letters' series, likewise juxtaposing image and text, Flanagan sought not to illustrate each emigrant's words, but to create a pictorial image that captured the emotion expressed in the words. Responding to a poem by Anne Sexton (1928–74), 'I see three windows in three different lights', Flanagan painted 'Three windows' (1973), a watercolour triptych in yellow, blue and green respectively, each with lines from the poem. While in America during a sabbatical year (1973–4), Flanagan had many lengthy, nocturnal telephone conversations with Sexton, who had heard about the painting; his intended visit to Sexton in Boston was obviated by her suicide.
Realising that his work was retrospective, not immediate, Flanagan avoided overt artistic responses to the Northern Ireland troubles, addressing them only intermittently, obliquely and reflectively, most often through metaphor. The imagery of the ghostly, highly abstracted, oil-on-canvas diptych 'An Ulster elegy' (1971; Fermanagh County Museum), and of the 'frozen lake' series begun in 1973, was metaphor for a blighted community in which people were frozen in inherited prejudices. The metaphorical forms within the austere watercolour 'Bogwater and bullwire' (1977) suggest barriers, incarceration, hillside graves, the underworld of the dead. 'The victim' (1974; oil on board) was Flanagan's response to the murder of a personal friend, Martin McBirney, RM; in an impersonal and timelessly solemn composition suggesting a carved marble figure on the base of a tomb, devoid of local or incidental detail, Flanagan mourned McBirney as a symbol of all those anywhere who have died in inter-communal violence.
Informed by a classical sensibility, evincing a concern for balance, harmony, order and clarity (a temper derived from Poussin and Claude Lorrain as filtered through Cézanne), Flanagan was attracted to the architectural detail and ordered ambience of Irish country houses, beginning with Lissadell and continuing with themed series in the 1970s of Castle Coole, Co. Fermanagh, and Enniscoe House, Co. Mayo; his watercolours in both series were marked by precise draughtsmanship and subservience of colour to line. Similar concerns and technique underlay the fourteen large watercolours derived from three months of travel in Italy and Greece in 1988, expressing his encounters with the architecture of classical antiquity and the brilliant, constant, piercing Mediterranean sun, so unlike the moisture-laden Irish twilight on which he was reared. Reckoned among the finest of his late works, these 'European journey' paintings were shown at his first exhibition at the Taylor Galleries (1992), his Dublin agent for the remainder of his career.
'Images around a journey' was a series of watercolours inspired by revisiting locations along the route of his childhood rail travels from Enniskillen to Sligo. Reviewing a 1979 exhibition of the paintings, critic Brian Fallon described Flanagan as a 'tonal' painter rather than a 'colourist', noted his sensitivity to atmosphere and light, and commended his 'fluid, unforced handling' that captured 'the moist luminosity of the Irish landscape' (Ir. Times, 19 October 1979). After retiring from his teaching position in 1983, Flanagan regularly walked the Lagan towpath in the Belfast hinterland; the resultant Lagan series was a recurring feature of his subsequent oeuvre, characterised by a tranquil mood and the monochromatic 'green filter of an Irish palette' (Kennedy (2013), 120–22).
Retrospective exhibitions of Flanagan's work were organised by the Arts Council of NI (1977) and the Ulster Museum (1996), the latter travelling to the Hugh Lane gallery, Dublin, and Fermanagh County Museum, Enniskillen. While most of his work is in private collections, examples are held by the arts councils of Ireland and NI, the Ulster Museum, DCGHL, IMMA, and the National Self-Portrait Collection, Limerick. Elected to the Royal Ulster Academy (1964), he was awarded the academy's gold medal (1976) and served as its president (1977). A member of the RHA from 1983, he was an honorary member (1985) and president (2007) of the United Arts Club, and was appointed to the board of governors and guardians of the NGI (2000). He received an honorary doctorate of fine arts from the University of Ulster (2010). Courteous, hospitable and articulate, Flanagan was an enthralling conversationalist, possessing, in Heaney's words, 'his own inimitable blend of humour and cultivation' (Flanagan Art website). His homes in Belfast and Donegal were magnets for people involved in the cultural life of Northern Ireland.
T. P. Flanagan died suddenly after suffering a heart attack while walking near his Belfast home on 22 February 2011. He had continued to paint: three newly completed acrylics were on easels in his studio. After funeral mass at St Brigid's church, Derryvolgie Avenue, Belfast, he was interred in Convent cemetery, Enniskillen.