Roisin Bateman

Roisin Bateman began her life and her art in the west of Ireland. After receiving her BFA from Belfast College of Art in Northern Ireland, she moved to the USA. For the past thirty years she has lived in Sag Harbor on the South Fork of Long Island. Bateman is not a “landscape artist” in the traditional sense. But her observation of nature’s laws of metamorphosis informs her work.

Bateman’s paintings, prints, and outdoor works have been shown throughout the US and Ireland, including at the Peter Marcelle Gallery, Bridgehampton and Southampton, NY; Folioeast, East Hampton, NY; Sara Nightingale Gallery, Sag Harbor, NY; the Nabi Gallery, New York, NY. the Heckscher Museum, Huntington, NY; Leiber Museum, East Hampton, NY, and the Linenhall Gallery in Castlebar, Ireland.

She has been leading art workshops for adults for the past 15 years, including at Guild Hall, East Hampton, Madoo Conservancy, Sagaponack, The Art Barge, Napeague, The Church, Sag Harbor, NY and JJML Library in Sag Harbor.  

"In this series of oil and pastels, I explore the metamorphic effects of weather upon the landscape. I am intrigued by the way color changes – how it manifests and dissipates as elements meet and cross. Working with thin veils of oil, or pastel, a fine dust, which can be rubbed in and lifted off, allow me to explore such an ephemeral subject. 

 I grew up in the wild and magical landscape of the west coast of Ireland. The qualities of that landscape with its ever-shifting texture of sea and sky, small rocky fields and hawthorn bushes bent by winter gales, live within me as inner landscape. The ever -changing weather  - dark moody skies with rolling clouds, which can at any moment give way to a sudden burst of sunlight, bring everything into a heightened state of color and aliveness.

The landscape of Eastern Long Island, where I currently live and work, is of a very different quality. Its texture is much more light-reflective – large expanses of sandy shore and flat farmland. 

The juxtaposition of these two environments creates a tension and a balancing of forces, which provide a very rich soil from which to create new form and expression."
- Roisin Bateman