The coming storm, Rush Harbour, Co. Dublin

This large canvas painted when the artist was 23, was one of a number of works by Patrick Leonard owned by the Belfast collector, Zoltan Lewinter-Frankl. Painted from Rush Harbour, The Coming Storm was worked up through studies made directly from the effects of an easterly gale. The strongly contrasting but limited colours, with the white crests of foam set against a range of blues and greens, and the loose handling of paint, increase the natural drama of the scene. The lines of foam leading the waves seem to set up a rather stylised abstract patterning that echoes Japanese depictions of similar scenes, guiding the viewer around the painting and keeping the surface of the sea alive with visual interest. Out towards the horizon these patterns simplify into horizontals indicating the recession of planes as they approach the calm but brooding sky. At the point where these meet, the line is broken by a triangle of a sail, mirroring the larger triangle in the lower right hand corner. In the heart of this painting about nature there is a reminder of human existence struggling against this storm in a small loughshinny yawl, of which only the sail is visible. The artist writes of the painting: 'The hull is buried in the waves - these yawls are a thing of the past long since'.
(Patrick Leonard, private correspondence, August 1998).