Clement McAleer (b.1949)

Trees in the wind (c.2019)

Clement McAleer was born in Co. Tyrone, Northern Ireland. After a foundation course at the Belfast School of Art (1971-72) he studied Fine Art at Canterbury College of Art (1972-75) and the Royal College of Art, London (1975-78). He was awarded the J Andrew Lloyd Award for Landscape Painting (RCA) in 1978 before moving to Liverpool where he was a prize-winner in the John Moores Exhibition (XI). He then settled in Liverpool and was based at a studio in the Bluecoat Arts Centre for twenty-five years.

McAleer kept in regular contact with his home base in Ireland, holding exhibitions across the country. In 1981 he was given a Major Award by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and in the same year completed a mural commission for The Royal Liverpool Hospital.

Having exhibited extensively in Dublin, Belfast, London and abroad his work has steadily entered public and corporate collections including the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin), Ulster Museum (Belfast), Walker Art Gallery (Liverpool), the Arts Councils of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the European Parliament (Brussels) and Allied Irish Banks. In 2003 he moved to Belfast where he joined Queen Street Studios.

McAleer’s paintings do not concentrate on the particularities of place, but rather the restless, shifting aspects of nature. This approach can be seen in Trees in the Wind which depicts fields in rural Co. Tyrone. In it, the leaves of the trees and the grass of the field transform themselves atmospherically, one into another.