O’Dea exhibition comes to Glór

ENNIS-born artist Mick O’Dea is still obsessed with toy soldiers. He doesn’t actually play with them but he’s still intrigued with what they stand for and the times they represent. His fascination is borne out of his interest in history, a passion, that was sparked at a very young age from the stories he grew up listening to in the family’s pub in Ennis from war veterans.

Mick has become best known for his a portrait and landscape work, so for many his most recent show Black and Tan, which has already shown to critical and public acclaim in the Kevin Kavanagher Gallery, is not something that was expected. But once Mick begins to talk about his passion for Irish history, as well as wars and battles, there’s no stretch in understanding where this exhibition came from.
“My inspiration for the Black and Tan work was stories I heard growing up from men in O’Dea’s Bar and from my father and his friends. I was eight years old at the time of the 50th anniversary of the 1916 Rising and it was a big deal at the time. They were different times, much simpler times than now, when there wasn’t as much of a focus on work and people would come into a bar during the day for a pint and a chat. There was still a lot of people around who had been involved in 1916 and in the Civil War and War of Independence. I remember the march through Ennis on the day of the 1916 commemoration events and the depth of feeling among people about it was very clear, even to me as a child. I was asking what it was all about and in the simplest terms, I thought there was a war between England and Ireland, which was obviously quite removed from the real truth and the extent and complexity of matters. But as a child, that’s what I understood it to be,” the artist recalls.
“My father, Mick, his two brothers, Tom and Paddy, were in the old IRA and both had been involved in the Civil War on the Republican side. Our pub had a mixture of customers from both sides, as well as quite a spattering of ex-British Army men, particularly World War II veterans. One man in particular, whom I can remember had been a plumber in Our Lady’s Hospital in Ennis. Christy Vaughan had one glass eye, as a result of an eye injury at the Battle of Monte Casino in Italy. From him and other customers, I heard lots of battle stories. We lived upstairs and there wasn’t much room, so I often had my toy soldiers down in the pub playing and invariably customers got involved with the soldiers with me and told me lots of stories. So I was acutely aware of soldiers, uniform, battles and wars, not necessarily as a child the reasons for them, but certainly the details of battles and uniforms and planes and as a child, I was captivated. I never lost that interest and the Black and Tan theme arises from that interest,” he explains.
“Listening to these men tell their war stories, I can remember often looking at their voices and seeing the emotion, the passion, the pride and the loss in their faces and from there, I became genuinely interested in people’s faces, which has inevitably led to my portrait work,” Mick adds.
From an artist’s point of view, he says that a two-coloured uniform is good to work with. “I deliberately called it Black and Tan and not Tans, because that gave me flexibility not just to deal with the Irish Black and Tans, enabling me to go into other eras and countries and adapt Black and Tan. The exhibition is based on archival photos researched from the National Archives. I work with those photos trying to be accurate regarding the equipment and uniforms, but also adapting with depth, colour and scene layout. This body of work is growing and evolving all the time as I come across new material and develop another idea. It is a continuation of a series of sculptures and other work I did about 20 years called The Plastic Warriors, which was based on toy soldiers that I used to play with. The Black and Tan work, however, is much less about play and more about investigating. The show in Ennis isn’t the show I had in Dublin and already most of the work from the Dublin exhibition has been sold into private collections.”
The exhibition opens in Glór, Ennis on Wednesday, September 8 but as Mick himself won’t be there, it will open quietly without any fuss.
“I’ll be painting in the Highlands, something that I had arranged some time ago. Instead, there will be an event to mark the closing of the Black and Tan exhibition, where I will give a lecture and talk about the show. This will give people time to see and absorb the exhibition and maybe some people will have questions, which I’d love to answer.
“Since the show in Dublin, I’ve had an amount of correspondence from relatives of Black and Tans. People were fascinated that the era had been addressed in art. The audience at the exhibition when it was in Dublin was far wider than those who would go to see other art exhibitions and it seemed to grab the interest of the general public just as much,” he says.
Mick now lives in Dublin, having left Ennis about 34 years ago to study art in the National College of Art and Design in Dublin (NCAD). He completed a Masters in European Fine Art through the Winchester School of Art but undertook the course in Barcelona. After his return from Barcelona, he taught in various places, including NCAD for about 16 years. “I also worked in the prison system for the best part of 10 years. The Department of Justice, in conjunction with the Arts Council, came up with an Artists in Prison programme also. I was hired for this work, along with two other artists. Initially, I taught the programme in St Patrick’s Institution for young offenders, which is located with the Mountjoy Prison complex. The artist who was teaching on the same scheme in Portlaoise Prison found that many of the Republican prisoners had secondary education and the art programme wasn’t challenging enough for them, so myself and Teresa McKenna, who was also involved in the scheme, drew up a programme which would give the prisoners the equivalent of first year of a degree in art college, carried out over the space of two years while they were in prison,” he explains.
Mick taught the programme in Portlaoise Prison. “It was a challenging project but I found that the prisoners on the art programme were very enthusiastic about learning and support for the scheme was immense. I’m not sure in its own right if an arts course helps towards rehabilitating an offender but certainly from the point of view of educating and challenging the mind, it quite likely has some rehabilitating consequences. After their release from prison, a number of those people went on to study at NCAD,” he says.
Throughout those years, he did many portraits, including lots of prisoners. “A lot of them really wanted to learn how to draw a portrait and I teach by doing, so I did portraits of the prisoners. They were very willing to be models and were intrigued to see the finished portrait. They said they learned a lot from me which was very satisfying to hear.”
He has also done many acclaimed portraits of various Irish characters, including writer, Colm Tóibín, Tom Kilroy, Roddy Doyle, Mícheál Ó Siadhail and well-known Ennis character, Tommy Kilhoury, which is in Clare County Council’s collection.
“I was also commissioned to paint the portrait of the then Lord Mayor of Belfast, Pat McCarthy, which hangs in City Hall in Belfast. In recent times, I also painted Ferdinand Von Prondzynski the former President of DCU, which was commissioned by the university. As he sat for the portrait, I learned from him that his grandfather who had the same name, was the first man to drop a bomb from an airplane on England. His grandfather was an engineer with the German army at the outset of WWI who persuaded a pilot to cross the channel to Dover in a flimsy aircraft to drop a bomb. His grandfather sat with the bomb between his knees and threw it overboard at Dover Castle, which he missed. No-one was killed though the vicarage was damaged. I love coming upon those kind of stories,” Mick adds.
He recently did the portrait of writer, Brian Friel, which is now hanging in the National Gallery of Ireland.
“The Royal Hibernian Academy has also asked me to do the official portrait of renowned artist Stephen McKenna, past president of the RHA, which I am taking as great recognition of my work,” he says. Mick also painted a previous president of the RHA, David Hone.
The Black and Tan exhibition will run at Glór from September 8 until 25.