COVER TO CANVAS ARTIST OF THE DAY – Brian Maguire, Artist

Brian Maguire is perhaps one of Irelands most accomplished and celebrated contemporary artists, not only because his work is stunning to behold but also because of his subject matter. He is not afraid to represent, in paint, life’s travesties, tragedies and social injustices, highlighting them in a way that cannot be ignored. True to form this is exactly what he did for the ‘Cover to Canvas’ project, researching the injustices and inequalities within the legal system for people living in poverty.

Brian speaks of the inspiration for his piece…

Art Work Title

‘Library/Poverty/Law’

My starting point was with a text by Balzac where he compared Law to a giant web which allows the big to pass through while capturing the small. Particularly in Criminal Law the outcome confirms Balzac. I worked in all of the Irish prisons throughout the 90’s and found that almost all prisoners came from a local authority housing estate background. I sought out the texts on Poverty among the texts on Law. Of the 21st Century there were none. The 20th Century had two – Poverty and Crime in Ireland by Bacik and O’Connell, 1998 and almost a hundred years earlier in 1904 H. Kingsmill Moore published a study of two decades from the early 17th Century on education of the Poor of Ireland. The 19th century had 5 books on the subject of poverty in Ireland and the 18th Century had two books. The picture poses the single book of Bacik and O’Connell among the bookcases of Law reports.

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