Considering the paintings and prints of Stephen Lawlor, I am struck by how apposite is that notion of an art that makes visible the invisible space of air. That world exists, in these works, in a liminal state, oddly resistant to the eye’s grasp and yet wholly palpable, wholly there. Gazing into one of his canvases you find yourself being drawn deep and deeper into a landscape – or a ‘landscape’ – sumptuous yet uncertain, that is at once familiar and ineffably mysterious. 

'There’s a Zen-like quality to the light in Stephen’s prints, the light of open mind meditation. The landscape features are invariably still, his trees particularly so, not a breath of wind to disturb our rapt contemplation. The air of serenity is both underwritten and guaranteed by the emphatic but understated mastery of technique, never showy or bravura, to be enjoyed to the full for its own sake but always at the service of the image.' THEO DORGAN (afterword)

'It is a magical, slightly eerie sensation; you seem astray in a forest, a garden, a numinously shadowed cityscape, under a turbulent gold-and-umber sky that seems moresolid, more grounded, than the ground you tread on.” JOHN BANVILLE (introduction)