AT A time when some Irish painters came to the west of Ireland and depicted a rural idyll, Bernard Canavan was, like many other people his age in the 1950s, boarding a boat to England.
The artist’s emigrant experience is captured in a new exhibition, Scenes From A Disembodied Past, where he explores the world of a generation of Irish people in Britain, exploring economic hardship, emigration, and the domination of the Roman Catholic Church.
The exhibition opens tomorrow at 6pm in The Kenny Gallery, Liosbán. The guest speaker will be poet Kevin Higgins. It runs until December 11.
Canavan grew up in Edgeworthstown, Longford, emigrating to England in 1959, working on construction sites and in factories. He returned to work in Dublin as a graphic artist with a display and advertising agency before finally settling in London as a freelance illustrator for the 1960s underground press, such as Oz and International Times. Since then he has had numerous solo exhibitions in the UK and Ireland, and is represented in collections worldwide
