Mick O' Dea

Mick O’ Dea from Co. Clare, studied at the National College of Art and Design Dublin, University of Massachusetts Amherst and Winchester School of Art in Barcelona and Winchester. He lectured at NCAD for sixteen years up to 1999. A member of Aosdána and recipient of multiple awards, O’ Dea was elected to ARHA in 1993, RHA in 1996 and PRHA in 2014. For his contribution to the revival of Anatomy as a subject for artists at the RHA School - where he was appointed School Principal in 2006 - he was elected a Fellow of the Anatomical Society in 2015. He has served on the Board of the National Gallery of Ireland, where he chaired the Acquisitions and Exhibition Committee. Chair-person of the Stamp Design Advisory Committee, he is also a member of the Philatelic Advisory Committee of An Post.

Hunt Museum

Madonna

 

Acrylic on linen canvas
50 x 61 cm

I have always been drawn to Romanesque sculpture and painting, especially after ten months studying in Catalonia in the 1990s. Surviving carved polychrome wood pieces particularly interest me (Enthroned Madonna, HCM 001). Think of what we in Ireland have lost during the Reformation and after. The fact is, with few exceptions, most Catholic churches date from the nineteenth century and more recent. How were the ruined friaries and abbeys, so abundant in the landscape, decorated and adorned. Fragments of frescoes survive here and there, such as in Clare Island. What combustibles fed the bon?res? So, I come face to face with sheer beauty, enhanced by the wear and tear of centuries on the wooden material and gripped by the expression rendered on this twelfth-century Madonna.

Limerick Museum

Garryowen

 

Acrylic on linen canvas
50 x 61 cm

The Garryowen plug tobacco sign on a building in Sars?eld Street, Limerick (LM 1987.0123) announced itself to me each time we took that ?nal left from Henry Street in the car, my father driving, to cross the Shannon for home. The Red Setter, standing in pro?le on a cadmium yellow ground. Garryowen, Errol Flynn and the Seventh Cavalry, up and under for Munster Rugby, not forgetting James Joyce’s Ulysses where the prize-winning Red Setter morphs into ‘that bloody mangy mongrel’ owned by the Citizen. The Irish Setter Garryowen, born in 1876 was a household name in Ireland. James Giltrap, the dog’s owner, was the father of Joyce’s uncle’s wife, on his mother’s side. That tobacco sign and Limerick are inseparable for me. We had a section in our pub come grocery in Ennis, where snuff and pipe tobacco such as Condor Plug, Mick McQuaid and Garryowen was stored. I went to that shelf for the older generation of men, mostly farmers: our last snuff customer was the late Kate Cleary.