Slieve na Brock by Colin Middleton

Slieve na Brock by Colin Middleton
9p Stamp issued 1971 - United Kingdom

Middleton (1910-1983) trained at the Belfast Academy of Art and was heavily influenced by the work of Vincent van Gogh.  His artwork was quite surreal in many respects.  In addition to being an artist, he was also a musician, theatre designer and poet.  In 1969 he was awarded an MBE and appointed an associate at the Royal Hibernian Academy, with full membership in 1970.

His work was one of three paintings in the Ulster '71 Festival stamp series:

Deer's Meadow by Thomas Carr

Deer's Meadow by Thomas Carr
7p Stamp issued 1971 United Kingdom

Carr was taught at the Slade School of Fine Art in London after selling an initial landscape painting in a local hotel during a three week holiday in Cassis, in the South of France. Commercially successful, this Northern Irish artist shunned adstractionism that was popular in the early stages of his career.  For much of his life he was a teacher and artist, living in the countryside of Northern Ireland in addition to living in Belfast from 1955.

This is one of three landscape paintings by Northern Irish artists that featured in an "Ulster '71 Festival" stamp issue:
TP Flanagan - A Mountain Road
Colin Midleton - Slieve na Brock

A Mountain Road by TP Flanagan

A Mountain Road, by TP Flanagan (1929-2011)
UK 3p Stamp issued 1971

TP Flanagan made a large contribution to the arts during his long career in Northern Ireland in the mid 20th century.  As well and being a teacher at the St Mary's Training College in Belfast until retirement in 1983, he had a parallel career as a professional artist in oils and watercolours was quietly flourishing throughout the 1960s and 1970s, with awards, exhibitions, honours, a television film (TP Flanagan: Painter).

He and his family were close friends with the famous Irish poet, Seamus Heaney, who was quoted as saying: "As an artist, Flanagan has gone his own way, explored the Irish landscape and enhanced Irish landscape painting through the discovery andelaboration of an individual style."


This stamp is one of a series of three "Ulster Paintings" from the Ulster '71 festival on 16 June 1971:
Colin Middleton
Tom Carr