The world according to Mick O’Dea

ONE of the country’s top contemporary painters, Ennis man Mick O’Dea has a new exhibition in Galway and his work has also gone on show in Cork’s Crawford Gallery.

The exhibition in Galway went on show on Monday and will be there until August 4.
“There’s a gallery on the Lower Salthill Road called the Norman Villa Gallery. It’s a very nice venue and I was invited as part of the Galway Arts Festival to have an exhibition there this year.
“I decided to put in an ongoing body of work that I had been involved with, painting landscapes along the west of Ireland, Mayo and Connemara mainly and an ongoing series of still lifes that I’m interested in, some nudes and some portraits. So it’s the kind of stable fare of the painter, working from observation on nudes, still lifes and portraits, that kind of thing,” he says.
“The one thing that they all have in common is that they’re done with the motif in front of me. If I’m painting a portrait, I’ll be commencing and completing the portrait with the person in front of me. I’ve got one of Gerry Stembridge and also one of Michael Harding, the writer and the actor.
“I painted those two in Paris a couple of years ago. Michael was doing a one-man show on Jonathan Swift and before he got on the stage, he sat with me in my studio. I have him in the character of Jonathan Swift. The one with Gerry Stembridge, he was in my studio and we had a good convivial evening, telling jokes, swapping yarns, talking about Limerick and Ennis and the painting came as a consequence of that. He was in jovial form and the painting is just a record of that time spent together,” Mick added.
When he spoke to The Clare Champion last Thursday, he was just about to head south. “As it is, I’m on my way down to Cork today, I have a piece of work in an exhibition on the painter Sean Keating, myself and Bobby Ballagh have a piece, we’re the living artist component in this show that’s opening in the Crawford Gallery in Cork tonight and it’ll be running for over a month.”
Based in Dublin, Mick has had a studio on the capital’s Henrietta Street for over 25 years, while he also spends a lot of time in North Mayo. The creative process is fairly constant for him, although he says his form can ebb and flow a bit. “Sometimes it doesn’t always happen for me but by and large, all my time is taken up thinking about and doing the work.”
However, with his work now on show in Galway, there is a little room for relaxation. “At the moment, having got the work finally delivered to Galway, you kind of exhale a bit on that, you can’t really be on the job all the time, you have to think, you’ve to take time out.
“I call it window shopping, maybe doing a bit of reading, looking at stuff, getting involved in other activities as well. I volunteer my time on various committees and that’s a good counterbalance.”
Very few of the paintings in Galway have been exhibited before. “They’re from the last three or four years and with one or two exceptions, they haven’t been shown before.
“I had a show in Dublin earlier this year and it was based on a theme that I’m interested in, the War of Independence. But I don’t want to put too many areas of interest together in the one exhibition so I decided to have the War of Independence exhibition as a stand-alone exhibition, exclusively on that theme.
“I’ve always kind of worked as a landscape painter, my first solo show was in Dublin and it was of paintings from West Clare, mainly done around Miltown Malbay, where I had a house rented for a summer. That has always been a theme and I thought that [Galway Arts] festival, the goodwill and the interest of the owner towards the work I’m doing was sufficient to get me mobilised to show this work together.”
While Mick hasn’t been in Ennis very much over the last few months, he will be coming back soon and will be involved in a documentary focusing on his childhood.
“Not as much as I used to be since my late mother died in November but I’m hoping to get down to visit my brother, John, in the pub in the next few weeks. There’s a documentary film being made on what it was like growing up in a pub and I’ll be down in a couple of weeks with a film crew for that.
“It’s part of a series of documentaries made on a number of Irish people and where they grew up and I was asked if I was interested in partaking and I’ve agreed, it’ll be focusing on growing up in a shop/bar in Ennis in the ’60s and ’70s.”