Caitlyn Rooke Painter

Painter based in Galway, Ireland.

Speaking of my work broadly, I’m interested in people’s perceptions of themselves and in their ideas of rightness and wrongness. Consistently, we humans tend to think we know far more than we possibly could about our potential selves. We know a great deal about life’s what-if scenarios and how we would react in imagined situations. And yet we often understand very little of our own actual reality, or of what we think we know. Additionally, the concept of time’s capacity to distort itself and our desire to call it progression interests me. Much of this stems from ruminations around the works of various writers, including Thomas Mann, Wislawa Szymborska, and Adam Phillips.

Visually speaking, I’ve taken to studying the Golden Age illustrators and 19th century portrait painters due to their wonderful use of realism. I find in their work a pursuit of the purest and simplest means to heighten their subject’s vitality so that it might continue living in a dormant painting.

Email: Contact@CaitlynRooke.com
Phone: 085.163.8260

My work is currently represented by The Kildare Gallery in Ireland.