Five West Cork students have won top prizes in this year’s Texaco Children’s Art Competition, with five-year-old Donnacha Buckley Moloney from Dromleigh NS in Kilmichael, taking second prize in the U6 category for his magnificent rendering of the Titanic.
He was not alone in representing the region as 18-year-old Skibbereen Community School student Brian Daly took silver too, for his work, ‘Still Life with Fruit’.
Young Donnacha was commended for his work by Pauline O’Connell, the final adjudicator of the competition: ‘Each artist’s view of life, reflecting the world around them, is unique, and a visit to a museum fuelled Donnacha’s imagination, evoking the sinking of ‘The Titanic’ as it slips diagonally across the compositional plane’.
Meanwhile, Mr Daly’s still life was singled out as it ‘demonstrates an economy of brushstroke and a mastery of minimalist staging, along with expressive paint handling.”
Three other local students walked away with Special Merit Awards, for works that Ms O’Connell judged to display ‘high levels of skill and creativity’.
They were Tadhg Kinsella (11) from Glandore National School, Avisa Singh (10) from Lisavaird National School, and Gael Taaffe (18) from Skibbereen Community School.
No stranger to the Competition, Gael also won a special merit award last year.
Other Cork winners include Hazel O’Brien, age 8, from Ovens National School, who took second prize in the 7-8 years age category for her work entitled ‘Me, My Selfie and I’.
Emma Fenny and Layla O’Mahony, both aged 14 and from Carrigaline Community School, scooped Special Merit Awards in this year’s competition, as did Hannah Watkins (5) from Scoil Chúil Aodha-Barr d’Inse in Coolea.
The Texaco Children’s Art Competition is popularly regarded as the longest-running sponsorship in the history of arts sponsoring in Ireland, with an unbroken history that dates back to the very first competition held in 1955.
Congratulations to all the talented artists who took part.
