Buttevant-based artist Julianne Guinee will make her television debut on the Sky Arts programme ‘Portrait Artist of the Year’ on Wednesday next, October 8th. The popular programme, hosted by Stephen Mangan, returned this week for its 12th series, and it is thought to be the first time that an artist from North Cork has appeared among the artists taking part.
In the lead-up to appearing on the Sky Arts programme, Julianne did ten practice runs of quick portraits in advance of the show, featuring people such as Mick Culloty and Emma de Búrca from Buttevant, Catherine Murray, Doneraile, and Julia Guinee, Lismire.
Known for her figurative oil paintings of women and children, Julie Guinee has quickly become one of the most striking new voices in Irish painting, and earlier this year was awarded the prestigious UCC Accenture Women on Walls commission, creating portraits of eight pioneering women for permanent display in UCC’s Aula Maxima. The work will be unveiled in November, and Guinee also features in an upcoming Virgin Media documentary to be broadcast in January.
Guinee describes her work as “a dark fairy tale about women’s work, women’s wounds, women’s inheritance.” Set within the shifting light of her Georgian home in Buttevant, her paintings explore the weight of women’s inheritance — the labour, the silences, and the rituals that bind family life.
Motherhood runs through Guinee’s practice, both as subject and lived reality. A former primary school teacher, in 2019, her twins Mabel and Blaise were born prematurely and died shortly after. Painting became both refuge and necessity. “During my maternity leave I painted through my grief, and in doing so I found a new path,” she says.
With her three young children often appearing in her work, Guinee uses the domestic interior as a backdrop, creating works that celebrate resilience, memory, and the magic of the everyday.