O’Dea’s portrait of Brian Friel unveiled

A PORTRAIT of Brian Friel, playwright and author, by Ennis artist Mick O’Dea was unveiled in the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin last Friday.
Deputy Mary Hanafin, Minister for Tourism, Culture and Sport, unveiled the portrait, with the playwright himself and the artist present.
The portrait was commissioned in 2009 by the gallery’s board of governors and guardians on the occasion of the playwright’s 80th birthday as part of the contemporary portrait series.
Born in Ennis, Mick O’Dea is a portrait painter now based in Dublin. He studied at the National College of Art and Design, the University of Massachusetts, and more recently at the Winchester School of Art in Barcelona and Winchester, by which he was awarded an MA in European Fine Art in 1997. He has taught and lectured throughout Ireland and in the United States and has won numerous awards, including the Keating McLoughlin Medal at the RHA in 1993, the Taylor de Vere Award for a work of distinction in any medium at the RHA two years later and several at the Arnotts National Portrait Awards Exhibitions.
He was elected both a Royal Hibernian Academician and a member of Aosdána in 1996. O’Dea has participated in several residencies in Ireland and has contributed to exhibitions and symposia in Ireland, Latvia, the United Kingdom, Spain and the United States. In 2005, he held a salon in the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris. Examples of his work are to be found in the permanent collections of many public and private institutions.
Brian Friel is renowned for his literary works including the internationally acclaimed play Philadelphia Here I Come, one of his collections of short stories, The Gold in the Sea, Translations and Dancing at Lughnasa, which have become classics of Irish theatre. Friel has penned more than 20 plays in total, including adaptations of work by such writers as Turgenev and Chekhov, demonstrating consistently an extraordinary skill in the writing of dialogue.