'Journey' by Clement McAleer

This beautiful painting by Clement McAleer, is acrylic on paper and is signed and dated with the year 2022.

Clement McAleer was born in Co. Tyrone, Northern Ireland. After Foundation Course in Belfast (1971-72) he studied Fine Art at Canterbury College of Art (1972-75) and the Royal College of Art, London (1975-78). He was awarded the J Andrew Lloyd Award for Landscape Painting (RCA) in 1978 before moving to Liverpool where he was a prizewinner in the John Moores Exhibition (XI). He then settled in Liverpool and was based in a studio in the Bluecoat Arts Centre for twenty five years. He kept in regular contact with his home base in Ireland over the years with residencies and holding exhibitions in various parts of the country. In 2003 he then moved  to Belfast where he joined Queen Street Studios (Belfast's oldest established artist's studio group). In 1981 he was awarded a Major Award by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and in the same year completed a Mural commission for The Royal Liverpool Hospital.

Having exhibited extensively in Dublin, Belfast, London and abroad his work has steadily entered public and corporate collections including Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin), Ulster Museum (Belfast), Walker Art Gallery (Liverpool), the Arts Councils of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the European Parliament (Brussels) and Allied Irish Banks.

The focus of McAleer’s paintings, primarily landscape; not the particularities of place, but rather the restless, shifting aspects of nature where cloud or water, land or sea transforms themselves atmospherically, one into another. The Irish coast is a dominate source and the memory of it lurks everywhere in the studio. Travels in Europe and America have also inspired a number of works, particularly the series of railway paintings in Italy, Germany and the Netherlands, where a stronger emphasis on structure again entered the work. Sometimes a visible grid is created and then submerged, abstracting each painting, serving also to release it slowly as the sense of ‘being there’ establishes itself.