At times in life, you meet people who leave a lasting impression, and you walk away thinking, I have never met anyone quite like him. Immanuel Godson was one of those rare souls.
I met him in 2019 in what felt like his true home: a community art gallery in the tough, proud working-class area of Darndale. He sat down for an interview with my brother and me, and afterwards, he warmly showed us his extraordinary work, speaking with passion and vivid detail about the many paintings he had poured countless hours, energy, and heart into creating. He was, without doubt, a remarkable artist and man—a genius, a maverick, an eccentric, an old soul, a troubled spirit, an Irish patriot, and a man of deep faith.
All of these qualities combined to make him the amazing artist he was. With a unique aura about him and a paintbrush in hand, he seemed almost magical, yet his wizardry and talent were matched by a tireless dedication to the canvas. His work and mastery were rejected by the contemporary woke art world because, in many ways, he exposed what it lacked. He was the Irish patriot’s artist: one of us, deeply devoted to his nation, his country, and his faith.
Like many of us, he saw the decline of this great nation. Where others struggled to express the pain and hardship Ireland has endured, Immanuel Godson gave it voice through his classical oil paintings, weaving sorrow, truth, Irish humour, and biting satire into works that revealed not only where the nation stood, but the heartbreaking path it was being led down.
The Irish Catholic nationalist channel Saints and Scholars paid the most moving and fitting tribute to this great Irishman:
Immanuel Godson, son of Ireland. There are men the country does not stamp on its coins, yet the country is made of them. He worked in the small light of a kept room, his mother’s house, the kettle’s patients downstairs and brought the living and the dead to the canvas, the new patriots, the ones whose faces the official galleries had not yet learned to hang. He gave them back their dignity in oil ,the set jaw, the kindness behind the eye, the cause held like a coal in the chest. They told him in the academy his hand was wrong, his subject wrong, his country wrong to love. They marked him down for the very thing that made him true. He kept painting. There was a war inside him also, voices that were not the rooms, a mind that broke like weather over the same fields again and again. He did not choose. He bore it the way the faithful bear a cross they never asked for, to the studio, to the altar rail, to sleep. His name was a sentence God had already spoken Immanuel with us, and he lived it, the lonely Godson, a son to Ireland’s freedom, a son to the church, faithful when fidelity earned him nothing. The world would name a wage. He died too soon. The brushes were still wet. The cause was not yet won. But a portrait outlasts the hand that made it, and the patriots he painted go on looking out from the wall into a freedom he believed in and did not see, while we who passed beneath them remember the man who would not be cured of loving his country or his God, and never once set down the brush. He is the hero in a time where a voice that enters no man’s land put his above the parapet. His brush was his voice, the canvas his manifesto, the frame his vision. He now rests with his kin where the pallet has no end and neither his name, Immanuel Godson.
My brother’s interview with the Late Great Immanuel Godson in which he kindly showcased his art after the interview.
Original article
Comments