Patrick Pye

(b Winchester, England, 10 April 1929). Irish painter, printmaker and stained-glass artist. Of Irish and English parentage, he settled in Dublin with his family in 1932. He started painting in 1943, first under Ois?n Kelly at St Columba's College and later at the National College of Art, Dublin. His travels through Europe in 1954 brought him into contact with Romanesque sculpture and the paintings of Giotto, which together encouraged him to create a modern Christian iconography, increasingly influenced by the work of El Greco. He began to work in stained glass in 1956. A Mainie Jellett scholarship in painting in 1957 enabled him to study at the Jan van Eyck Akademie in Maastricht, after which he continued to produce paintings and stained glass; he made windows on commission for churches such as Donegal Square Church, Belfast, Milford Church, Donegal, and others in Dublin, Loughrea and Cookstown. Among his paintings are landscapes executed during a visit to Denmark and Norway in 1972, and later to Spain, but it was in paintings of religious themes that he particularly distinguished himself. Mature works such as the Resurrection (c. 1974; Carrigrohane Parish Church, Co. Cork), painted in oil on canvas, are richer and more dramatic in effect than earlier paintings such as An Easter Triptych (1956-7; Cork, R. Wood priv. col.), which were generally painted in tempera. His etchings, such as those included in his book Apples & Angels: Pages from an Artist's Notebook, treated religious subjects, landscape and still-life. Pye edited Introspect (1975-6) and wrote extensively about his religious and artistic tenets.

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