The main exhibition at this year’s Clifden Arts Festival is a show of portraits by renowned artist Mick O’Dea. Featuring many of his friends from the arts world, it gives an insight into his work over forty years, as he explains to JUDY MURPHY.

“I’m sociable, I’m interested in people and I like listening to their stories,” says Mick O’Dea, whose major exhibition at Clifden Arts Festival offers a glimpse into his work over the past four decades.

He describes the show, at the Station House Museum, as  “a mini-survey of my work and an insight into the approach I have taken over the years”.

The Clare man, who is one of Ireland’s leading artists, is no stranger to the Connemara festival, having shown there most recently in 2017. On that occasion, most of the paintings were landscapes; this time, the focus is entirely on portraits, with many of them capturing his friends from the creative world.

Local subjects feature large in this show too – people who are either from the area or have taken part in the Clifden festival throughout the decades.

These include the late cartographer and author Tim Robinson.

In his portrait, Tim is sitting in a simply furnished room at his Roundstone home, light coming in from behind, as he gazes directly at the artist. Mick first got to know Tim and other local people through his involvement with the Inishlacken Project, an artist residency scheme, run by Roundstone-based artist Rosie McGurrin, who also features.

Another local figure is Richard de Stackpoole of Errisbeg, looking regal as a Supreme Knight of the Order of Malta.

There’s Séamus Heaney, also holding Mick’s gaze, the warm orange hues in the background encouraging the viewer to focus their total attention on the poet.

Robert Jocelyn of Doonreagan, Cashel, seems to be in another world as he looks into the distance in his portrait, which Mick painted in Ballynahinch Castle in 2016.

Mick’s formal training in art began when he attended the NCAD in Dublin after his Leaving Cert, following a passion which began in Ennis, where he was born in 1958.

He studied art at secondary school, where he had an inspirational teacher, and where he honed his skills in all classes by drawing pictures of his friends.

The purpose was twofold, he says.

“It tested my ability to capture a person’s personality and it was a way of improving my work.”

Mick cites “curiosity and a genuine desire to get under the skin of the sitter” as being at the heart of his need to paint portraits and that’s been the case since childhood.

After graduating from the NCAD, he attended University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and the Winchester School of Art in Barcelona and Winchester,  where he was awarded a Masters in European Fine Art. With his portraits, which have won him numerous awards in Ireland and abroad, he is following in a long European tradition of figurative art.

Mick describes himself as “a documentary photographer, but rather than using a camera, I’m drawing and painting”.

Pictured: Artist Mick O’Dea in his studio. PHOTO: EMILE DINEEN.