HONORA O'NEILL (CONTEMPORARY)

Title: The Cottage (2025) Medium: Oil on Canvas Signature: Signed Lower Right Provenance: The Artist's Studio, The Dillon Gallery, Dingle, Co. Kerry Framed Lot Description: A richly textured oil on canvas by Honora O’Neill, portraying a traditional Irish cottage set against a dramatic coastal Dingle landscape. Executed in vibrant impasto, the work captures the intensity of light and colour across the sky, land, and sea. Signed lower right. Presented in a black frame with gilt slip. Image: 68.5 x 96.5 cm. Framed: 95.5 x 123.5 cm. PICTURES AND PRINTS Tuesday 16th September 2025 21:15:00 Biography Honora O’Neill is a Dingle-based painter whose practice offers a profound meditation on landscape, memory, and cultural inheritance. Rooted in the rugged terrain of West Kerry, her work reflects an intimate dialogue with place, one shaped by stories of her grandmother’s emigration from Cathair Scuilibín in Chorca Dhuibhne. That legacy, both personal and collective, is etched into the surfaces of her canvases. O’Neill studied at the Crawford College of Art and Design in Cork, though her truest education came on the cliffs and headlands of the Dingle Peninsula, where she sketched compulsively through all seasons. Today, she paints from a studio overlooking “The Sleeping Giant” (An Fear Marbh), a constant reminder of the mythology and geography that inform her vision. Since opening The Dillon Gallery in 2006, O’Neill has established herself as both an artist and cultural presence in Dingle. Her painting The Spirit of Dingle was commissioned for the iconic Dingle Gin and Vodka labels, a rare instance where fine art becomes entwined with local identity and contemporary craft. Her work has also hung alongside preeminent Irish painters in University College Cork, the Dingle Skellig Hotel, and other private and public collections in Ireland and internationally. Her solo exhibitions as well as her contributions to group exhibitions regularly sell out, further cementing her reputation as one of West Kerry’s most vital contemporary voices. Her paintings have additionally sold at auction, marking her as a listed artist and reinforcing the collectability of her work. Working primarily in oils, O’Neill is noted for her handling of colour and texture: layered surfaces that suggest both the turbulence of the Atlantic and the fleeting, mercurial light of the western seaboard. Her canvases resist sentimentality, offering instead a painterly response to the elemental forces that continue to shape Ireland’s cultural and natural landscape. Recent Exhibitions Féile na Bealtaine at The Dillon Gallery 2023 (sold out)