2020 “Seeing Red” a body of work (in progress).

At first glance this is a collection of Irish landscapes deliberately skewed, but their origin runs far deeper than at first apparent.

This project began in Kerry in 2017. I came to wondering what the first men felt when they saw the Skelligs or the bay of Ballinskelligs when the Blood Moon burns water and rock red. It was this other world I set out to capture on canvas. Hearing Sean O’Conaill’s Tales of Iveragh, the folk tales and stories of the past, I was further inspired by the colourful language used to describe the accidental and amazing change of light that surely is Nature's creativity.

I resolved to start Seeing Red in my favourite east coast haunts too.

By employing a palette inverse to Irelands’ shifting shades of green I strive to depict our familiar landscape as other world. Now I’m searching with red eyes below the visible plain to a realm bathed in the past, energy and magic.

“…his images could be straight out of my own memory, very strange and wonderful, the red lightship, the Wicklow high valley, the angel glimpsed,” said Irish Laureate Sebastian Barry when launching Rod Coyne’s solo exhibition in 2009. 

Born in Dun Laoghaire Rod Coyne studied locally before graduating from the Crawford College of Art in Cork. After 10 years working in his Düsseldorf studio, he returned to Ireland in 1999. The same year saw Rod as winner of the prestigious London South Bank Banner competition.

The artist exhibits extensively in Ireland and abroad including the Origin Gallery, Royal Hibernian Academy, RUA, Solomon Gallery, London, Europe and the USA.

His paintings grace private, public and corporate collections alike, including Irish Central Bank, Bank of Ireland, Department of Justice, the Shelbourne Hotel (Dublin), OPW, Gerling Global Insurances (Germany) and Roland International Legal Insurance (Germany).

Rod now lives and works in Co. Wicklow where he founded his studio/gallery in the Vale of Avoca.