Obituary: Noted Laois artist had a lifelong passion 

Paul Guilfoyle 1950 – 2026

LANDSCAPE artist Paul Guilfoyle of Old Town, Abbeyleix passed away peacefully in early August, after a short illness, in St Luke’s Hospital, Kilkenny.

Paul and his wife Anne had lived at Old Town, on the edge of the Abbeyleix Estate, since shortly after their marriage in Belgium in 1983. Paul’s wife Anne Van Dorpe, whom he met on an art course in the Burren, is herself an accomplished artist, working mainly in watercolour. Besides Anne, Paul is survived by his two sons, Jan and Nicholas, their partners Lara and Jenny and little grandchildren Emilie, Noah and Loa.

Paul was an admirer of landscape and an artist-in-the-making from very early in his life. His imagination was first inspired by the beauty of the west of Ireland. As the youngest of four children, he and his siblings spent many a day over successive summers exploring the south shore of Clew Bay, in particular in and around the little village of Lecanvey.

As he went, even at that young age, Paul would no doubt have taken in how the hills and the islands and the sea of this special place responded to its unique, ever-changing light. The relationship which he would go on to develop with landscape and light would grow to become his first love, a love that would soon become woven into the rich tapestry of his life.

It was this early and lengthy apprenticeship that would lead him to develop fully his artistic self and express it through the medium of oil painting. And, later in life as an artist of national and international renown, he would go on to share with us the beauty of landscape in all its colours, moods and forms.

Paul himself often acknowledged that his childhood summers, and subsequent visits to the west as a young adult, were to profoundly influence the direction of his life and to give him the precious and sustaining gift of a lifelong passion for painting.

His work was not, however, confined to the west of Ireland. His artistic embrace extended also to the soft woodlands, seasonal subtleties and slow rivers of his home county of Laois. He would draw inspiration on long solitary walks by the wooded banks of the River Nore and in the airy openness of sky and bog along the Abbeyleix Bog Walk, only a kilometre or so from his home at Old Town.

Beyond Ireland, Paul was to apply his artistic attention to the wooded hillsides, autumn-tinted vineyards and ancient stone walls of the South of France. He would render the autumn light, russets and warm honey colours of Languedoc-Roussillon onto beautifully wrought canvases.

Over his life, Paul progressed as an artist from first exhibiting in a corner of a Dun Laoghaire shopping centre, his mother standing guard over these his first works, to fully professional art gallery exposures, including regular exhibitions in the Kenny Gallery in Galway.

Initially, like all artists, Paul painted for himself, out of his own personal desire to celebrate and recreate on canvas the beauty he saw around him. As a modest person, public exposure of his work was sometimes a stressful event for Paul. In this, he was probably no different than any deeply conscientious artist or writer’ keen to do justice to his or her subject. 

However, the success of his exhibitions was a great encouragement and made easier for him the difficult decision to give up his occupation as an accountant, and become a fulltime professional artist.

Though he exhibited all over Ireland, painting for Paul was an intensely personal transaction between his subject and himself. Every work was different, inspired by carefully considered selection from the wealth of different and unique ways landscape can present or communicate its beauty. As an artist true always to his subject, he never repeated, nor ever copied nor was ever moved by commercial considerations. He put his heart and soul into everything he did, even to the extent sometimes of regretting the passing of his work out of his hands.

In Paul’s passing, the west of Ireland has lost one of its great admirers and artistic interpreters. But his work, in its global reach, will outlive him and indeed all of us into the future. RIP