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About Grace Sugrue Art
I paint under the name Grace Sugrue but I am also known by my gaelic name
Grainne. I’m an Irish artist based in Cork in the South of Ireland. My artistic
career started after the sudden and tragic death of my 19-month old daughter
following a short but devastating illness. In the months that followed and
during the first lockdown in 2020, I found a way of putting my deep pain and
heartache on the canvas and coming out with something joyful, vibrant and
positive. Since my daughter Aoibhin’s death (pronounced Eaveen and meaning
beautiful in gaelic) I was fortunate to go on to have another precious daughter
Alanna. As a solo mother of two, a bereaved mother, and someone who had a
bumpy road to motherhood, I do not take life or family for granted and I’m
very grateful for every moment I get to spend with my large but close-knit
extended family. I realise that life is about the small things, and health and
family are everything. My art allows me to tune into this everyday.
My art is therapeutic both for the artist and the collector. Inspired by the beauty of nature and the sea, many of my paintings combine the vibrant colours of the hedgerows and meadows with the calmness and tranquility of the sea.
I paint using acrylics, without too much planning and mostly wait to see what inspiration I get from putting the brush to the canvas. Very often the artwork turns out differently to what I expected at the beginning. All paintings start with layers, building up on top of each other to show texture, and the depth of colours in the meadows, hedgerows and fields of flowers. My greens are of every shade possible and are in every direction, to show the vibrancy of Irish grasses. My flowers commence with transparent layers and I build up the colours using opaques of various shades to show the shading of the petals and the light shining on them. My skies vary from grey to blue to purple and orange to depict the range of clear and vibrant, or brooding and rainy skies that exist in an everchanging manner in Ireland.
From spending all my childhood summer holidays and much of my adult free-time in Co. Kerry on the world-famous Wild Atlantic Way, I am very familiar with the amazing colours found along the coast – in the grasses, the flowers, the hedgerows, the clouds, and the sea – all elements that appear in most of my art.
Prior to discovering art, sport was a huge calling for me and I still work in the sports world, running a successful reformer pilates studio in Cork. I have a BA degree in International marketing and languages, and an International MBA - two degrees that allowed me travel and spend time living abroad in France, Germany and Austria, feeding my love of beauty and nature. My time as a scuba diving instructor allowed me to appreciate the ocean – both above and below the water. I discovered my artists eye around this time through photography and would rarely go anywhere without a camera. This has helped hugely in composing paintings in my head.