Art Blog

This painting is called “Native: Big Chief O’Brien” and is one of five in the “Native” series. I had been carrying the images around with me for close to 20 years and have finally got around to using them. The delay is probably not such a bad thing, as I would have painted them very differently back then.

“Native: Big Chief O’Brien” 70x100cm, oil on canvas.

I am really happy with how he turned out. As usual the painting became something quite different to what I had planned. I started out wanting to paint a big head to hang in my gallery window. My further brief was to look for a landscape in the face, a rugged, weathered and gnarled image to be contrasted with a flat background colour ala Andy Warhol. But straight away I was so taken with his feather and plaits that I had to include them, thus reducing the overall size of the head on the canvas. I feel I did get the landscape in the features, but as far as the background is concerned I really went off the rails. I really like it, I think it complements and echoes the painting style around the features and has radiant heat in the colour while up close has a dreamy palette knife impasto.

The native theme arises from the term Native American, which got me thinking about the term, and how do we perceive it; when and where is someone native, and when are they not. So I decided to play on those questions by confusing the titles, where the name is a mixture of a “typical Indian” name combined with some typically Irish family name.