Birney has always loved painting. Since she was young, she recalls feeling excited in the art section of a shop and asking for paints for Christmas.
“Every Christmas my Santa letters would have been paints and brushes and art stuff,” she tells The Irish Catholic.
Just recently Brigid’s work was beamed up onto the front of the General Post Office (GPO) in Dublin to mark St Brigid’s day. Herstory, which campaigns for the recognition of historical female figures, ran its annual light festival on January 31 to February 3, 2020. They have been campaigning to have St Brigid’s Day become a national holiday.
Brigid says it was a really good opportunity and one of the moments that has motivated her into doing more Christian themed art.
“I hadn’t ever done religious themed stuff before. At Christmas, Fr Phair, our local parish priest, instead of sending out Christmas cards this year he thought he would just write out something on a big poster outside, wishing people happy Christmas,” and he asked her to make a painting to be printed and hung up.
For the Herstory painting of Brigid it was a friend who told her about the entry.
“Most people wouldn’t even know its St Brigid’s Day whereas St Patrick’s there a huge celebration,” says Brigid. “I wanted to do it on a Christian theme, I’d still be involved in my faith a lot, so I wanted to do the cross, St Brigid’s cross. My interpretation of it was a peacefulness, a tranquillity and because I’m called Brigid as well, it was sort of an extra wee boost.”
She says she was happy they worked out, although she has been painting full time for two decades she has never worked with a religious theme. She often depicts wildflowers and seascapes.
“I love working with flowers, I love painting them it just comes to me so easy,” she says, explaining how they scenes she usually does come naturally.
Brigid says that she tends to be more critical of “a lot of the figurative ones I’ve just got one woman in them I think maybe I paint people alone or there’s sort of a loneliness I don’t know why, there might be people in the background but I wouldn’t make them as significant.”
The two themed paintings she has done recently are both figures; St Brigid and the Madonna and Child. However, Brigid says these came easily to her. “I would like to do some more of those, it seemed to come very naturally to me and maybe it’s just the knowledge of Christianity.”
She says she is planning to do more and has been practicing with pencil sketches that she was asked to do for the Church in Bundoran to help inspire new stain glass windows.
Brigid enjoys going to Lough Derg, not too far from her home in Kinlough, Co. Leitrim, and this was where she first thought she might try a religious theme in her art. “It’s lovely and peaceful and quiet beside the water.” She says that it all just came together in the last few months, “I’m called Brigid and it’s spelt the same way, I couldn’t believe it in the end when it all came together, especially to get the GPO. Years ago, my granny’s cousin was one of the members of the first Dáil and all that.”
She tells The Irish Catholic how she couldn’t wait to get to secondary school, “because at national school you just do wee bits but I knew there would be full classes and double classes in secondary school and I loved that.”
Her art teacher, Sr Enda Canning allowed the class to experiment. Brigid ended up going on to do graphic design in college after a foundation art course, “which I loved, it was fine art and life drawing and sculpture ceramics, jewellery making, prints and photography and professional studies,” she says.
“After I did other jobs, secretarial work, you know just to get money,” she says, explaining how she didn’t get back into painting until her eldest son was born, when she had time off and then went to work part time.
She was living in Belfast and then Bristol before returning to Ireland around 20 years ago. “When I came back to Ireland there, I couldn’t get any part time so I just started painting.
“It was my sister that said ‘you should really try and get some of those framed and put them in’ and I didn’t really think any art galleries would want them,” says Brigid.
She only framed three in the beginning and put them in an exhibition. They all sold.
Brigid went on to exhibit in galleries around the north west then approached private galleries, “Then and they started taking my work and it started selling so of course I kept painting.
“Even if they’re not selling, I paint some days and someone might say ‘oh are you painting that for somebody’ and I’d say no, I’m just painting because I want to paint and I love painting and if they sell it’s brilliant.”
Brigid is part a group exhibition coming up in April, in Hambly and Hambly at Dunbar House in Enniskillen; an estate house that has been converted into a gallery. Her work is on show in Leitrim Design House and often in Solas Art Gallery in Ballinamore.
“I was thinking one day this is great therapy because when you’re painting you can’t actually think about anything else you just sort of think about what you’re actually painting you just sort of block everything out, without intending to it just sort of happens.”