There are certain rare moments in life when I feel I am witnessing magic, I try to capture this in a painting. I grew up on a dairy farm in East Donegal, where the large dramatic skies and open landscape have influenced my vision as a painter.
Many of my paintings are a visual diary and an emotional interpretation of events in my life, featuring people and places that are dear to me. I make paintings in order to have a conversation with, or tell a story to the viewer. When I produce a body of work I feel as if each painting is a chapter of one book.
Elements seem to creep into my paintings slowly of their own accord. After I graduated from art college in 2000, I was painting quiet empty landscapes for a long time. From 2008 tiny signs of human life started to appear – telegram poles, chimneys. From 2012 animals appeared in my landscapes, then by 2016 humans started to arrive. The human figure was very far away at the beginning then they gradually came closer until I could see their faces.
Humans led me to houses, such as the farmhouse where I grew up in East Donegal, the old Georgian house where I lived in Dublin for twenty years and buildings I saw in Norway while on residency there in 2018.
Most of my paintings are set in winter, I prefer the raw mood and light of a season when the elements of nature are stripped to their bare essentials.
I spend a lot of time outside taking photographs, especially at dusk when the atmosphere is most intense. These photographs are used as source material for my work later on.
Ann Quinn, 2023
Throughout my life I have had a yearning for wilderness and wild creatures.
When growing up in East Donegal, the landscape of cultivated land and farming was never quite enough for me. Wolves had been eradicated by the 18th century but they came into the stories my older siblings read to me. I was deeply affected when my border collie disappeared when I was 9 years old. Animals both wild and domesticated have become an important presence in my art.
In the winter of 2023 I spent a month at the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming. This artists’ residency is situated on a 20,000 acres cattle ranch in northeast Wyoming at the foothills of the Bighorn Mountains, close to the border of Montana. Here, too, wolves had been eradicated; the last recorded native wolf was shot in Wyoming in 1943.
After I returned to Ireland I was haunted for a long time by this – imagining the loneliness of being the last one of your species in the land.
Hunting is a part of country life in both places, Donegal and Wyoming. I grew up with a tradition of hunting fox, pheasant and hare which has been part of the culture of East Donegal since the 1800’s.
In Wyoming, the sight and sound of hunters in orange vests, and the constant noise of gunshots during deer culling season reminded me daily of the absence of the rightful hunter, the wolf. I was even given a hunter orange vest for my daily hikes so the hunters would see me in the landscape but the deer – blind to this colour – would not. It made me belong to the hunters, not the hunted.
This exhibition is an amalgam of these places and experiences, as well as an homage to wolves and all wild creatures.
The Last Wolf, solo exhibition at Taylor Galleries, Dublin, October 2025
ann quinn 