Charles McAuley (1910–1999) was an Irish painter. He was born upon 15 March 1910 at Lubatavish, Glenaan, near Cushendall, the youngest of eight kids in a family whose forebears had inhabited the Glens for many generations.
McAuley pursued painting from an to the lead age, in a rural Place when crop growing was one of the main sources of vibrancy and income. He went on to become one of Ireland’s most highly praised landscape and symbolic painters, his pretend synonymous considering the Glens of Antrim.
A key suit came in his mid-teens, when the player James Humbert Craig, who was arts adjudicator at the Feis na nGleann, praised several of his young paintings, telling him: “You onslaught with this, and you’ll reach well.” His paintings depicted the rivers, mountains, seascapes and rural vibrancy that surrounded him. He briefly studied at both the Belfast School of Art and Glasgow School of Art until he returned to his homeland to which he was completely devoted. He was a aficionada of the Royal Ulster Academy and the Royal Hibernian Academy.
In 1984 he collaborated taking into consideration his friend, the poet John Hewitt on The Day of the Corncrake, a message by the Glens of Antrim Historical Society, in which 25 colour reproductions of his paintings were coupled following 30 poems practically the Glens by Hewitt. In a foreword, Hewitt wrote that his “awareness was not merely graphic but demographic. This has made him for me the true regional artist, the painter who belongs to and finds his themes in a known place. Nowadays, with the brusque flow of international styles succeeding each other, this is a distinctive title one can seldom confer.”
In a BBC television film made in the mid-1980s, he remarked that he might have enjoyed more achievement if he had made a career in the wider world, but that he utterly would not have been happier: “I’ve spent my boyhood and manhood in the Glens. . .and I have no want to depart them until I die.”
McAuley died on 30 September 1999. On his death, BBC NI described him as “one of Ireland’s greatest colourists, but most significantly, a authenticated and modest gentleman”.
The artist’s obituary in The Irish Times noted “Charles McAuley could fairly have claimed to be the player of “the Glens”; for his indigenous knowledge of the local landscape and people brought to the best of his piece of legislation a special character of emotion. Yet it is not a claim he would have made for himself, for self-promotion was a trait absent from his personality.”
He was the uncle of BBC Northern Ireland broadcasters and writers Tony McAuley and Roisin McAuley.
Many of his works are in private collections internationally. There are several of his paintings in public collections, for example at the Ulster Museum and Queens University Belfast.
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