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The 2007 Connor/Moran Award for Sculpture, a silver medal and €1,750 cash, was presented by Cathleen Moran, wife of the late former CEO Joe Moran, to Elizabeth O' Kane, who won the prize with for her sculpture 'Cody'.

The 2007 Keating/Mc Laughlin Award for Painting, comprising a silver medal and €1,750 cash, was presented to artist Francis Matthews by Pat Boyle, Manager, Property & Facilities for his work 'Kilmainham Lane'.



		RHA Annual Exhibition ESB honoured former CEOs Thomas Mc Laughlin and Joe Moran on Friday 18th May at the Prize Giving Day at the 177th Annual Exhibition of the Royal Hibernian Academy. ESB has sponsored two prizes at the RHA Annual Exhibition this year: The Keating/Mc Laughlin Award for Painting 2007 and The Connor/Moran Award for Sculpture 2007. The prizes were selected by an ESB internal selection committee, comprising Brendan Delany, ESB Archive and Heritage Manager, and Pauline Holland. Brendan Delany explained: “ESB believes that these awards for art and sculpture help profile the importance of visual arts and the contribution they make not only to enhancing the workplace but also to help provide us with a better appreciation of the relevance of art in all its forms in our daily lives”. About the Artists Elizabeth O' Kane Born in 1970 in Ballymena, Co. Antrim, Elizabeth studied French and Spanish, qualified as a translator and completed a Diploma in Business at the Smurfit School of Business in UCD, before she took up formal painting and sculpture classes and decided to make a career of being an artist. Her work features in City Hall, Belfast, in both the Mater and St. Vincent Hospitals, the corporate collection of Treasury Holdings and in private collections in Ireland, the UK, France, USA, Canada and New Zealand. Her sculptures are for the most part representational but she has an innate ability to capture personality and expression. Her paintings are architectural and she mainly works in watercolours, painting buildings and cityscapes. She was recently awarded a commission to make a six-foot tall bronze sculpture of the Count John McCormack, which is due to be installed in the Iveagh Gardens, beside the National Concert Hall next year. Francis Matthews Born in 1981, Francis is a Dublinbased artist. He graduated from architecture at UCD in 2004. A self-taught artist, he focuses on architectural forms and creates evocative and beautiful imagery from what many would regard as very ordinary or mundane scenes. He has a huge interest in painting nocturnal scenes, which he enlivens by using light, shadow and reflections, all of which work to invite the onlooker to imagine what is happening and so become part of the picture's story. Francis was the recipient of the John De Vere 1st Time Exhibitors Award RHA 2006, also the Naughton Award RHA 2006. He was a runner up the Hennessy Craig Scholarship Award at this year's RHA Exhibition.		The 2007 Connor/Moran Award for Sculpture, a silver medal and €1,750 cash, was presented by Cathleen Moran, wife of the late former CEO Joe Moran, to Elizabeth O' Kane, who won the prize with for her sculpture 'Cody'. The 2007 Keating/Mc Laughlin Award for Painting, comprising a silver medal and €1,750 cash, was presented to artist Francis Matthews by Pat Boyle, Manager, Property & Facilities for his work 'Kilmainham Lane'.