Makers & Brands
Ireland Framed
Irish art has a particular way of making a place feel close — and of keeping it close, long after you have left.
From a studio in Cork, Blue Shoe Gallery sends it out into the world.
Art connects us to memory, to feeling, and to the people we choose to share it with. It carries something of the place that inspired it.
A cottage kitchen. A harbour. A brightly painted street. A room that feels familiar even if you have never stood in it.
Irish art has that particular way of making those places feel close. And when it travels beyond Ireland, it can become something more personal — a way of keeping Ireland close.
That is the idea at the heart of Blue Shoe Gallery.
Based in Cork, Blue Shoe works with Irish and Ireland-based artists to create high-quality reproductions of their work, hand-framed in Ireland and beautifully packaged for gifting.
The art begins with the artist. From there, Blue Shoe handles the printing, framing and finishing, preparing each piece in Ireland before sending it on to its next home.
Blue Shoe Gallery is the work of Clive Salter and Eileen O’Brien, whose paths first crossed through the Irish craft industry. But their connection to making goes back much further.
For Clive, even the name Blue Shoe carries a family story. His grandfather opened Salter’s Footwear in the west of Ireland, and Clive spent some of his earliest days behind the counter. It was the kind of family business built on knowing what you sold, knowing who you were selling it to, and standing behind it. Years later, those same instincts found their way into a very different kind of product.
Eileen grew up with making from another direction — in a home where things were fixed rather than replaced, made by hand, and done with care and detail. That early respect for craft and quality never left her.
If something is worth making, it is worth making properly.
Together, they have built Blue Shoe around much the same idea. Professional printing, archival-quality paper, locally made frames, and careful hand finishing all happen through their Cork studio and trusted local network.
It means the care does not end when the artist finishes the painting. It follows the work all the way through — into print, into its frame, into its packaging, until the piece becomes part of someone else’s story, connecting them to the place that inspired it.
David Minehan
Ireland, welcoming you home
David Minehan paints the Ireland many people carry in their heart — cottage kitchens, open half-doors, glowing hearths and rooms built around gathering. A self-taught artist from Dungarvan, much of his work draws on memory, particularly his grandfather’s kitchen and the hospitality that surrounded it.
Karolina Di Duca
Ireland in colour
Karolina Di Duca sees Ireland in colour. Her mixed-media work captures the landmarks, villages, architecture and streets that stay with you long after a journey ends. Her Ireland is bright, joyful and immediately recognisable — the colour of a shopfront, the curve of a street, a familiar building seen again — capturing not just where you went, but the feeling of having been there.
Art does something different from most things we bring back from Ireland. It stays visible.
It becomes part of the room, part of the everyday, part of how a place remains with us.
Perhaps that is what Blue Shoe Gallery sends out from Cork more than anything else.
A little piece of Ireland, made to travel.