Marie Carroll

Marie Carroll was born in St John's Wood, London, of Quaker stock. Her formal training was at Goldsmith College of Art where she spent three years learning and developing her masterly control of light and colour. The influence of her early impressionism and postimpressionism is readily recognisable in Marie's work. After graduating from college she spent a number of years working in Paris from where she moved to Montraux, Switzerland. On returning to London she took up painting full time and started to sell through well-established galleries in Sloane Square and London's West End. Marie moved to Ireland in the 1970's where she fell in love with the vibrant landscapes of counties Dublin and Wicklow. Her work is also inspired by the bustle of street activities and market places; She likes to paint en plein air thus capturing the spontaneity of the moment.  Today the dominant themes in her painting are seascapes and landscapes, which reflect her interest in the painterly  concerns of contemporary French painting and illustrate the success with which the artist assimilates aspects of impressionism in her work.    

Since coming to Dublin twenty years ago, the city’s manifold enticements – its parks and Georgian squares, handsome streetscapes, elegant public buildings – all the charms of a spacious yet intimate capital – have captivated Marie Carroll and provided the inspiration and subject matter for her delightful paintings.

She believes in catching the essence of the fleeting moment and nowhere is this more vividly portrayed than in her scenes of café and pub life. Favourite Dublin meeting places – Bewleys and the Shelbourne – and the newer convivial establishments such as La Stampa and Café en Seine with their air of European panache, are brought to throbbing life. The insouciant crowds and busy, scurrying waitresses are captured in a riot of harmonious colours, applied with a seemingly spontaneous yet masterly hand.

She sees Dublin as a feminine city and Dublin is indeed the heroine of her paintings.

She has depicted some of our best loved Dublin landmarks: the HalfPenny Bridge, glowing and magical in a late October twilight; the unobtrusive urbanity of the Mansion House, transformed by her Gallic sensibility to evoke memories of the more exuberant Hotels de Ville of Southern France; the Campanile, companionable yet aloof in the front square of Trinity College; the tall, narrow red-brick house as you turn into Sth. Leinster Street with its faint white letting, Finn’s Hotel, still discernible on the gable end where Joyce’s beloved Nora worked as a chamber maid in 1904.

A visual chronicler of Dublin, Marie Carroll is in thrall to its moody seductiveness, a moodiness for which the absentminded nature of the Irish Climate may be held responsible.

Like Paul Henry and Patrick Collins, the wonder of the ever changing Irish sky casts its spell on her. And, like Flora Mitchell and Harry Kernoff before her, the people of Dublin, at work and play, their streets, pleasures and preoccupations, are her abiding themes.

She is an instinctive preservationist. “I don’t like to see my city vanishing before my eyes” she has said. A hearty amen to that. But above all, she is a painter of happiness and of joie de vivre.

Maureen Charlton