TO FIND Paddy Lennon’s studio, you must negotiate a warren of sinewy roads and, once off the beaten track and sheltered by Wexford gorse and farmers’ ditches, you are on a country lane impervious to the outside world. Kilrane, perhaps the driest spot in a country synonymous with rain, is a heartbeat from the international ferry port of Rosslare, but at Liosin Equestrian Centre, where the artist’s studio is bookended by stables, you wouldn’t think so. Liosin is swaddled by the ebullient verdancy of summer and cradled by incessant bird song, only interrupted by the familiar chorus of horses in a busy equestrian centre. Inside Paddy’s studio, the idyll of the outside world is kept at bay – but only just. Though buffeted by voluble equid neighbours in adjacent stables, it doesn’t take long to immerse oneself in the cauldron of a working studio, where a riot of paintings, sketches and an imbroglio of charcoals, produce an immediate slide show of the inner workings of the mind of an artist. His stimuli – whether a horse or a mounted memento mori in his studio – is the perpetuance of living, the past and the future, though this may be a debatable interpretation. Even so, the issue is less that his intuition never fails him, but his faith in it doesn’t wane. The artist’s lot is akin to the loneliness of the long distance runner. PaddyLennon has the physical presence of Liam Neeson, dwarfed only when he stands beside his monumental white Irish draught, Thadeus, a horse for all seasons. Paddy’s ability to mirror that rip tide of sinew and muscle so prevalent in his portraits of horses he is intimate with on a day-to-day basis, is without equal in contemporary Irish art. We have to reach back to the feral oils of Jack B Yeats to encounter an Irish artist who shares Paddy’s natural, almost primeval, eye for what makes a horse tick, for that keen intelligence and surety of touch that is able to probe the ancient and impenetrable mystery lurking behind the wary eye of a white horse, upon whom is garlanded a fertile mythology since the dawn of time, from Pegasus to Uchaishravas. The simple curvature of the horse etched into the side of a hill in Uffington in England pre-dates the similar sketch experiments of Cubism by three thousand years; not so easy to calculate is the emergence of Pegasus, purportedly from the blood of the decapitated Medusa, while the steeds of St. James and St. George have leapt from the pages of the Bible into the national patronage of two countries historically divided by religion, Spain and England. The horse in art, destroyed in the ring by Goya, elevated in David’s Napoleon, is – in an Irish context – and brilliantly wrought in his West of Ireland scenes by Yeats, a figure of magic realism, though Paddy Lennon differs from Yeats by excluding a garrulous narrative from his pictures. Yeats uses the horse as a prop to further a story. Lennondoesn’t. His horse emerges from a somnolent darkness – the metamorphosis from artist’s imagination to canvas complete – establishing its own presence calmly, but is devoid of the violent struggle of the horses – with nostrils flaring – emerging from the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum. Lennon’s horses exist as if in a dream. One cannot help but recall the horses in the frieze slabs in the British Museum when advancing towards Paddy’s magnificent assembly of horses: Whacker, Guapo, Cheeky or Silver Prince. The obduracy of resignation, or a horse at one with itself, permeates the aforementioned charcoal on conservation mountboard portraits by Paddy, though devoid of the sheer exhaustion to be found in the Elgin sculptures, such as Selene, sinking into the depths of Okeanos, exhausted by its journey across the heavens. Paddy’s Leaping Horse, for example, is full of energy and is set to leap from a coil of inertia, poised like a tiger in its eagerness to be off. Highly sought after by both private and corporate collections, such as the Curragh Club in Hong Kong, Sheik Muhammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the Spanish Consulate in Dublin and State University New York, Paddy’s work, particularly his large landscapes, are successful in his eyes only insofar as they can arouse sensations and stimulate the viewer. Critic Diarmuid O’Muirithe has discovered in Paddy’s work ‘a constant tension in his landscapes between the various elements in whatever scene that has caught his eye and engaged his soul, be they the wetness of brown bog land, the harshness of the rocky fields with which man has wrestled for untold ages to conquer, or the merest glimpse of a still sea in the distance.’ A dexterous movement of his hand, following the trajectory of his vision, strips away the epidermis of a caul of oil on the canvas, for here is also a landscape artist who minces colour until he has exposed the essence of a landscape, bathe in legible abstraction. ‘When I paint, what interests me in the work is its underlying abstraction. That is what generates its quality, its life and its innate truth.’ And in a sense, when you are placed in front of his much larger landscape canvases which brood like a spent storm in high summer, when you study the transmogrification from vision to execution, and the viewer becomes one with the colour, you have a fundamental appreciation of Cezanne’s maxim: form finds its plenitude when colour is at its richest. If you need to solve the mystery of why Paddy’s horse studies are so manifestly alluring, pause before the meticulous attention he gives to the eye, in recognition that it is the aperture to the horse’s soul, the seed of its personality and the flowering of its provenance, which is freedom at all costs. Paddy’s career has had a long and winding road since he emigrated at 17 to London where he would study and receive a diploma in Fine Art from the City and Guilds Art School: a peripatetic existence has seen him live in Dublin, Connemara, Mexico, Spain and now 13 years in Wexford, celebrated throughout Ireland for its equestrian industry. It is the best of both worlds: two hours south from Dublin by car, Liosin is akin to a private atoll set adrift from the hullabaloo of the mainland. Quietly spoken and modest in private, Paddy Lennon is in love with life. Born in Dublin in 1955, and in between curating almost 40 solo shows in two decades in venues as diverse as the Galleria Espacio in Jerez in Spain and Portico Gallery in Hong Kong, he has established the perfect milieu for an artist whose twin obsessions – work and horses- exist side by side, so that he can effortlessly segue both. A prolonged perusal ofPaddy’s extensive studies of equine anatomy, with specific emphasis from shoulder to forelock – Sam Murray, Falbrav, Arkle, Bering – can only but distil the vast emotional empathy between the artist and his subject, and the recognition that, for all that they may have in common, no two horses are remotely the same, and this provenance renders his work unique.