O’Dea’s Black and Tan exhibition continues in Dublin

MEMORIES of playing with childhood soldiers in O’Dea’s Bar in Ennis has been the inspiration for Mick O’Dea’s latest exhibition, aptly called Black and Tan.
The talented artist has taken a step back to his boyhood days in Ennis, where he played toy soldiers in the family bar, O’Dea’s, in the company of ex-British service men who had fought in World War II and Old IRA veterans.
Forty years on, the artist recalls, “In my father’s pub, the ex-British army men were rank and file rather than commanders, though when it came to giving me advice about how to lay out my plastic soldiers, they took on the role of commanders.” For Mick, the childhood military toys would inform two decades of his visual art practice.
In this new exhibition at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, O’Dea uses his wealth of experience as a painter of the human face and body and as a landscape artist conscious of the ever-shifting patterns of light.
Throughout Black and Tan, previously inanimate faces are lit up by living warmth and personality. The artist added, “History is never over. History is always present.”
Black and Tan emanates from an intensely rich research project the artist has undertaken. O’Dea has been delving into the national, official and unofficial, archives; disseminating information and images from history books, drawing and painting vast canvasses; remapping in digital the early historical photographs he has collected.
The most unusual finding from his research is the one that underpins this exhibition. O’Dea reveals how the official Irish Civil War was foreshadowed by the Irish men who aided and abetted the notorious Black and Tans during the Irish War of Independence. The show is primarily concerned with the War of Independence from the time of the arrival of the Black and Tans in March 1920 up to the truce in July 1921.
The artist has drawn on the visual traces of the Irish past to create a radical intervention into how contemporary audiences and future generations remember war. The artist began some of these portraits by literally projecting the archival photographs onto vast canvases. Then he sketched the bodies and the uniforms and built the characters in charcoal before painting washes of acrylic colour into the frame.
Black and Tan by Mick O’Dea, with an accompanying essay by Catherine Morris, is at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Chancery Lane, Dublin 8 until April 3.