Eveleen Power - Biography

From 1988 Eveleen studied at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, after which time she gained experience in a wide range of creative activities including theatre design, community art, and commercial design. She has exhibited locally, and has completed numerous commissions which have especially enabled her to develop her skills as an insightful and competent portrait artist. (The National University of Ireland, Galway recently acquired one of her works.)

While her earlier work relied mainly on the use of watercolours and pencil drawings, she has more recently moved into working in acrylic on canvas, pastels and mixed media.

Two main themes are evident throughout her career as an artist: the natural landscape and the human figure. One of the driving forces behind her work since her time as a student has been the study of human expression and behaviour, with a focus on capturing those characteristics particular to the individual which are often evident in facial expression and physical gesture. The relationship between childhood and adulthood is also a concern, as is the desire to represent both the force of the sea and the body in terms of biography, upon which are inscribed themes of home, movement and the alluring and elusive force of yearning.

Such a concern for the individual is also present in another facet of her work, which reveals a natural progression from more realistic representations to images that have an imaginary or dream-like quality. In these, we witness an attempt to look beyond the external to the internal or subconscious of the individual, and as a result the real is combined with the imaginary, the human figure and the natural landscape are represented as part of the same dream. Eveleen lives and paints in her native town of Dungarvan, Co. Waterford.