Colin McGookin RUA

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Artist Bio

Colin McGookin’s art has developed steadily since graduating from Belfast College of Art in 1981. His first professionally exhibited paintings were collages and cloth banners shown in various exhibitions in the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin from 1978-1981 and since then he has been extensively exhibited all over the world winning prizes including 1st Prize Claremorris Open and the Conor Prize Royal Ulster Academy with his work receiving positive critical acclaim. Professor Liam Kelly of the University of Ulster and past Director of the Orchard Gallery Derry said in his book Thinking Long “There is a relentless quest for the interrelations of man and woman in nature in Colin McGookin’s highly referential paintings. There is a thinking long, a longing to return to the ‘indivisible ground of creation’. ”
 
Dr Anthony Buckley of the Ulster Folk Museum said in his catalogue essay to McGookins 1991 exhibition From Tradition into the Light “McGookin’s mythologies point most obviously to the life cycle, to the cyclical physiological processes of birth, sexuality and death, and once again to birth. These he uses in turn to evoke the cognitive, emotional and social awakening of the child as he grows into a man. These mythologies of universal processes also take on a Northern Irish flavor. Thus the awakening and enlightenment are portrayed as growing from the parochial mythologies of a traditional loyalist past. What is left unclear and deliberately unresolved in these paintings is the question of whether, once this growth has occurred, a person must once more return to his parochial and local roots. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust. The artist’s apprehension here is one he shares with his liberal contemporaries in Northern Ireland. There are many Northern Irish people – especially those in the middle-classes – who would grow out of the ‘sectarianism’ of their ethnic roots. Yet many of these simultaneously have loyalties – not least family ties – which bind them to their ethnic past. McGookin’s pictures therefore stand as a metaphor for those people who would like to live in the bright cosmopolitan light of a future world but who find they cannot entirely relinquish their loyalty to family, to ethnicity and to the past. McGookin’s vision, then, is one not quite of tragedy nor yet of hope. His pictures bridge the past and the future, the old and the new, the parochial and the universal, the familiar and the exotic, the forces of destruction and those of creation. They suggest this through a mythology at once both sexual and religious which evokes both a hopeful, creative sense of progress, and a tragic zoetropical eternal return. In this cycle of life, one may aspire to an ecstatic union with the exotic and the universal, but there is a real possibility that one will return to the particularity of one’s origins, a clay which, for an Ulsterman, has a singularly tragic taint.”

Recent results for Colin McGookin RUA

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'FIREBALL COTTAGE' SIZE: H 6.5" x W 9.5" Result: £100 Date: 10/05/2023
'THE SUN WHEEL HUNTERS ECSTASY' SIZE: H 46" x W 34" Result: £100 Date: 16/03/2026
'SPRUCEFIELD BEE HIVES' SIZE: H 6.5" x W 11" Result: £80 Date: 06/06/2023
'MONEY ORCHARD' SIZE: H 6" x W 8.5" Result: £80 Date: 30/06/2023
'GHOST OF THE FAMINE' SIZE: H 8" x W 8" Result: £80 Date: 30/10/2023
'FLIGHT INTO EGYPT' SIZE: H 11" x W 8" Result: £70 Date: 11/05/2022
'STARLINGS & RED KITE' SIZE: H 7" x W 8" Result: £70 Date: 05/09/2023
'CLOAK & DAGGER' SIZE: H 8" x W 8" Result: £70 Date: 30/10/2023
'PRUNING WILLOW' SIZE: H 8" x W 8" Result: £70 Date: 30/10/2023
'CAMEL' SIZE: H 8" x W 8" Result: £70 Date: 10/04/2024
'SCALES' SIZE: H 6" x W 5.5" Result: £60 Date: 18/01/2023
'CAVEHILL & BITCOIN WIND' SIZE: H 8" x W 8" Result: £60 Date: 19/08/2025
'NUDE STUDY' SIZE: H 5" x W 7" Result: £50 Date: 09/08/2023
'PUNAN'S EYE' SIZE: H 5" x W 7.5" Result: £40 Date: 02/10/2023
'TRUMPET COTTAGE' SIZE: H 8" x W 8" Result: £40 Date: 19/08/2025