getting your face out into the world of art
The Bad Art Gallery has launched David Dunne's career
Saturday March 06 2010
If you were an artist, would you want your painting to hang in a gallery called "The Bad Art Gallery"? Well, believe it or not, many do. At a time when a number of galleries have had to close because of the recession, The Bad Art Gallery on Francis Street, Dublin, appears to be thriving. Co-owned by sisters Deborah and Denise Donnelly, their ethos has been to go back to the pre-Celtic Tiger way of buying and selling art.
Forget the boom times, when you might have bought a painting because of the expensive price tag or because the critics said that you had to have one of these on your wall. It would appear that we have returned to the radical idea of buying art because we like it.
"By calling it The Bad Art Gallery, you are going to remember it, and it is up to you to decide if what you are looking at is good or bad," says Denise. The gallery receives five to 10 emails a day from artists who are desperate for the gallery to see their work. However, Denise and Deborah are very particular about sticking to no more than 50 artists at a time and they give them 100pc promotion.
The sisters grew up surrounded by artists and so very much had the background knowledge when they decided to open their own gallery. Their mother, Clare O'Farrell, is an artist and Deborah's own art can be seen in the gallery too. One of the most recent artists to have caught their attention is 27-year-old David Dunne. He describes himself as a contemporary Irish realist-portrait painter. The Bad Art Gallery is hosting his first solo exhibition this month.
Dunne himself is, in a way, a product of the recession. Having studied architecture and technology, he worked in this field for five years before losing his job. He had been drawing since early childhood and, left with time on his hands, began painting. He is completely self-taught and now his hobby has become both his passion and his new career.
Why portraits? "People interest me," he says. "I don't think there is anything else I could paint that would hold my interest for eight or nine hours a day."
Over the last few years, he has started to concentrate on his preferred medium of oils. He mainly works in black and white as he is colour blind. He did try to work in colour, but it didn't work.
"Particularly with realistic portraits, you have to have the colours right," he says. "Any attempts I did make at a colour portrait didn't work as the colours weren't right, even though I thought they looked fine."
Dunne concedes that black and white is always popular. "It can have a lot more depth and in a way, being colour blind has formed my own style. It's kind of a unique story, it's different."
Dunne's first solo exhibition, Icons, includes incredibly realistic portraits of the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Clint Eastwood, Bono, Barack Obama, Muhammad Ali and Johnny Depp. Sadly, none of the celebrities was free to sit in studio for Dunne, so he worked from photographs and, indeed, his work has that photo-realistic quality.
However, with portraiture, it is one thing to capture the likeness of the person, but what about capturing their essence and personality?
This came easily with Bruce Springsteen, which the artist believes is his best painting. "I am a huge Bruce Springsteen fan and that shows through when I'm painting him," he says. "I tend to listen to his music when I am painting him, I think it helps. You are maybe sitting in front of his face for six or seven hours, you lose yourself in it."
Curator Denise Donnelly spotted something unique about David Dunne when he first came into the gallery.
"He had never even gone to art college, which in a way is better because art college can teach you how to paint in the wrong sense. When you are self-taught, you are a lot freer on the canvas. I took a couple of his paintings and they sold straight away."
So who is buying Dunne's portraits? "It's the type of person who would never go into an art gallery" says Denise. Taking the Bruce Springsteen portrait as an example, she put it in the window of the gallery and a massive Springsteen fan had to have it! "They came in and asked how much it was and the purchase was made!"
All of the paintings in this exhibition are once-offs -- David hasn't done any prints. Prices are generally under €1,000 and start at an affordable €250. With galleries running into debt around the country, Denise has seen that you are only as good as your last show.
"We were never in it for the money," she says. "When you are in it for the money, you can forget about it, the strong artists will survive this recession."
David Dunne's Icons can be seen at The Bad Art Gallery, 70 Francis Street, Dublin until March 25. www.thebadartgallery.ie/ www.daviddunneart.com
Aedín Gormley presents Arts News, Tuesday to Thursday at 6.40pm and Movies and Musicals, Monday and Friday at 7pm on RTE lyric fm
Irish Independent
