Ramie Leahy

Ramie Leahy is an artist and a co-founder of Ireland’s first international arts festival, Kilkenny Arts Festival. One of the group of Kilkenny Colourists, a group he founded with his peers Francis Tansey and Tony O’Malley, he has variously been described as an impressionist and a surrealist, whose works range from landscapes to political satire and natural history studies. Leahy has specialized in the use of high intensity colour in all his artistic forms from landscapes to political satire and natural history studies. He has variously been described as impressionist to surrealist in his extreme use of his mediums, primarily oil paints and watercolours. Through the 1980s he worked on a series of paintings exploring ancient cultures from Brittany through England to Ireland and Jersey. In 1996 Leahy and a group of high-profile artists with links to his hometown of Kilkenny founded the Kilkenny Colourists Movement. Others in the group included Tony O’Malley and his wife Jane O’Malley, Francis Tansey, and other Irish impressionist artists whose work involved a particular focus on the use of colours. The group continued to exhibit together, usually during Kilkenny Arts Festival, during the late 1990s.