Skerries artist Leonard Sexton has just closed an exhibition showing off a wide range of his works in conjunction with The Blue Leaf Gallery at the OPW offices in St Stephen’s Green in Dublin.

Painter Leonard Sexton explains why his work, including the new exhibition Broken Halos, is always large scale.

The Adage of never judging a book by its cover also applies to judging paintings by a jpeg. I had only ever seen Leonard Sexton’s artwork online and, to be honest, wasn’t hugely excited about viewing his nudes, despite such lofty credentials (he studied under one of Ireland’s leading contemporary Artists, Patrick Graham). But on entering the OPW’s gaping exhibition space, I was pleasantly surprised; where I first expected to find lurid, derivative displays of abstract expressionism there were instead monumental, luminous and quite extraordinary canvases.

Motherhood is a subject too rarely explored in contemporary art. ‘Broken halos’, an exhibition of new paintings by Leonard Sexton, promises to at least partly redress this imbalance at the Blue Leaf Gallery in Dublin. The stresses of the various stages of motherhood are depicted in unsentimental mode – aging, caring for the young, changing nappies, carrying the child.

In today’s art world, the space that exists for painters is one that has, to a large degree, been carved out by artists themselves. Confounding predictions of its demise, painting has not only survived, but thrives. Moving from a position where the very concept of applying oil paint to canvas was cast into doubt, as an art form dependent on readings involving emotion and empathy, painting today enjoys a revival that is a testament both to its own resilience and that of its practitioners.