A VERY POLITE YOUNG MAN
I wanted to be an artist from a very early age and would spend my pocket money on a jotter and pencil instead of sweets and chocolate. I studied Art and Design at school and was accepted for Belfast College of Art in 1973 but a bitterly disappointing grade at A Level persuaded me to abandon my Art dreams and go to Queens University to study Modern Languages. I became a teacher of Spanish and French and taught mostly Spanish until I retired in 2012.
Throughout those years I continued to draw and paint when I could. In the early 90s I managed to find time in my busy schedule of full time teaching and being a mother of three, to attend classes at the Crescent Art Centre. From these I was able to exhibit and sell my life drawings in watercolours and pencil in a range of venues. When I retired I signed up for portraiture classes at the Crescent. I had never seriously attempted to paint in oils but during the pandemic I took an on line course with English artist, Clae Eastgate and I discovered an exciting and versatile new medium.
This year marked my fourth attempt to have one of my oil paintings accepted for the RUA. I would do the initial work with a live model in the Crescent then finish it in stages in my little studio in the garden. Mostly I prefer to depict the whole figure and in this painting the model was Conall, a young man who works at the Crescent. He was very polite and pleasant and had an uncanny ability to sit absolutely still for the duration of the three hour session. I enjoy the vividness of oil colours and like to experiment with contrasting colours and shades. I also started to play around with with background designs and I allowed myself to have fun trying out different geometrical shapes, stripes and flowers.
I am fascinated by the work of painters like Lucien Freud and Jenny Saville and I am a huge fan of David Hockney and more recently, Alice Neel. I love the design work of Gustav Klimt, Matisse and Egon Schiele. I recently entered my seventh decade and am delighted to mark it with a painting on the wall of the RUA, a collection I have visited and admired for many years and whose catalogues I have been collecting and regularly browsing for inspiration.
Áine MacParland