Michael Monaghan: Rhythm Forged
Michael Monaghan channels music's emotional rhythms into abstract oil paintings built from layered textural forms.
Rhythm Forged captures the intense physicality of Michael's painting process, where movement, instinct, and surface collide. Each work feels carved from motion itself—brush and knife working in dialogue, shaping dense layers of oil into living texture. Monaghan’s impasto technique is central to this transformation; thick pigment is pushed, scraped, and coaxed into forms that hold the memory of his gestures. The surfaces breathe with rhythm and resistance, at once raw and refined, revealing the tension between control and abandon. Colour surges and recedes like a pulse, forging visual energy from instinctive action. In these works, painting becomes both a bodily and emotional rhythm—an act of forging rather than depicting. Rhythm Forged invites viewers to feel the charge of creation itself, suspended in the tactile power of paint.
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Michael Monaghan, Arum Lilies in a Black Vase -
Michael Monaghan, Blue Bridge, Whitebrook
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Michael Monaghan, Bouquet on Pink
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Michael Monaghan, Japanese Sunrise
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Michael Monaghan, Roses on Blue
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Michael Monaghan, St. Mellon's Church, Caerdydd
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Michael Monaghan, Sunflowers and Daisies
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Michael Monaghan, Cedars of Lebanon
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Michael Monaghan, Interior of St John's Church, Caerdydd
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Michael Monaghan, Lilies in a Blue Vase
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Michael Monaghan, Man of the Streets
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Michael Monaghan, Pheasant with Fruit
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Michael Monaghan, Rain in Moonlight
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Michael Monaghan, Storm Eowyn
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Michael Monaghan, Stormy Seas with Blue Sun
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Michael Monaghan, Sun in a Raging Storm
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Michael Monaghan, The Glass Vase
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Michael Monaghan, Flower and Grasses
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
IMPASTO!
NEW WORKS BY ELOISE GOVIER AND MICHAEL MONAGHAN
AT ORIEL CANFAS, CARDIGAN
Dates: 30 May to 4 July 2026
Drinks Reception & Meet the Artist: 30 May, 13:00–15:00
Canfas Gallery, Cardigan is pleased to present Impasto!, a new exhibition featuring Welsh artists Eloise Govier and Michael Monaghan, running from 30 May to 4 July 2026. A special drinks reception and Meet the Artist event is being held Saturday 30 May from 1-3pm.
The exhibition makes a compelling case for impasto not as a stylistic choice but as a way of thinking — a means by which paint becomes a record of everything the body and mind bring to the act of making. Both artists work at the edge of what oil paint can do, pushing thick pigment into surfaces that breathe with rhythm, energy, and the unmistakable trace of physical gesture.
Michael Monaghan is an established artist who has exhibited widely across the UK and France. His work spans an ambitious range of subjects — still lifes with flowers, Welsh architecture, portraiture, and abstract landscape — unified throughout by a commanding impasto technique. Thick pigment is pushed, scraped, and coaxed into forms that hold the memory of his gestures; surfaces that breathe with rhythm and resistance, at once raw and refined. Colour surges and recedes like a pulse, forging visual energy from instinctive action. Across every subject, painting becomes an act of forging rather than depicting.
Eloise Govier's practice draws upon the principles of Expressionism and the bold chromatic clarity of Fauvism, interpreting the landscapes of Ceredigion and Pembrokeshire as emotional and sensory experience rather than literal depiction. The old harbour town of Abergwaun, the iconic Parrog, the Teifi estuary at Patch — all rendered in colour combinations that are at once surprising and completely convincing. She has become wildly popular with collectors for that fearless generosity with colour and the raw physical energy of her palette knife technique. It is eighteen years since her first professional solo show on Cardigan High Street, and Impasto! marks her first return to the town since 2022 — there are a lot of people who have been waiting for her return.
Together the two bodies of work reveal the tension between control and abandon that lies at the heart of Impasto! — vivid, visceral, and entirely alive. "There is an intensity to both bodies of work that demands attention — as an exhibition they create a remarkable dialogue. Impasto! felt like a natural pairing the moment we began to think about it," said Curator Anne Cakebread.
Canfas Gallery Cardigan is sponsor of the 2026 Eisteddfod Gold Medal for Fine Art. The gallery was founded in 2019 and has established itself as one of the leading galleries in Wales. It has been featured on BBC One News, S4C, and in national newspapers and magazines. Under new ownership, the gallery aims to collaborate with other galleries and showcase the work of established and emerging Welsh artists, and to bring to West Wales exemplary artwork from other nations. Canfas aims to curate beautiful and powerful art—art that inspires us to see the world from different angles, that explores what it is to be human, and that pushes cultural, political, and stylistic boundaries.
Media Contact for interviews in Welsh and English:
01239 614344 info@canfas.co.uk www.canfas.co.uk
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Oriel Canfas Gallery, Manchester House, Grosvenor Hill, Cardigan SA43 1HY
Open Tuesday–Saturday 10:30–4
