Jim Donnelly is a professional artist based in Carlow.
Born on 21st March 1964, I began my meteoric descent into artistic oblivion the minute I popped out of my mother’s womb. I wish I could say that the first thing I grabbed was a pencil or paintbrush, but the truth is probably a little more mundane…. The first lesson that life teaches you is that it is not all going to be fun and laughter.
Where it started
A second son for my Father, I find it difficult to picture him happy about my birth, but I can remember his loving concern for my mum with ease. One sister, another brother, and another sister later, did not diminish that concern. A man of science, he discovered the only disease that is idiosyncratic to Ireland, something that is called spongebob something or other.
He taught me how to see. He taught me how to identify different species of birds and plants, how to look at nature and how to discern the differences between things. Like how to tell the difference between a willow warbler and a chiffchaff. `For years I believed there was none and was amazed that Carl Linnaeus and people of that ilk could see there was. Genius seems to be the ability to see things that other people can’t, unfortunately, it also seems to be a symptom of mental illness and people often confuse the two.
Dad possessed genius and I, like many artists possessed self-delusion. Many years after Dad had discovered ‘bovine gangliosidosis’ he told me that hundreds of other scientists had looked at the same thing that he had, but they did not realise they were looking at something new, he did. His model of that particular corner of the scientific universe was more accurate.
I knew I could trust my Dad to teach me how to see, a useful thing for artists as well as scientists. Academically, I was sub normal, a straight F student. I was far too busy with flights of fantasy to apply myself to study, I was unable to find fun in it! It wasn’t until I saw “Paint along with Nancy” on television in the 70s that I realised, there were adults making a living doing something that I could do. Forty something years later my childhood perception still delights me!
She was painting Lowry type matchstick figures on glass, I had a eureka moment and realised that all I had to know in life is find out how to paint matchstick figures, she couldn’t be on telly for ever, I could take her job, easy, education over, all I had to do is learn how to paint matchstick figures and I’m laughing!
I couldn’t have been more wrong
I continued to perform abysmally in school, my parents put it down to the fact that I had been in a car crash when I was a baby and had been unconscious for a short while. For years they thought I was brain damaged. My test results at school confirmed this. When I eventually collected my leaving certificate results I said to the school secretary “mine is the one with all the fs”, she looked down at the report card and said, “I think you are right”. I left the school pleased with my ability to predict accurate results, but fearful of my future.
Art school required five passed subjects, but I didn’t even have those. Back in the old days all you needed for admission was a good portfolio, I had that. All I wanted was to study art, what use was a quadratic equation or a past participle to me. In many households, and from my perception at the time, art school was perceived to be the place you sent the family fool. It was not seen to be a pursuit that was useful to society, like being a doctor or a social care worker.
When I told people, I wanted to be an artist, their eyes would fill with pity as if they were thinking “you even need training to be a tramp, I mean artist…your poor parents”.
Interviews
I got called for an interview on the grounds of my portfolio and did my best with my non-verbal skills to obtain a place. I failed. Was my portfolio lacklustre? Were there too many goblins from the Hobbit? Were there too many magic mushrooms? Could they tell I hadn’t read Derrida? I was three years trying to secure a place.
I did a post leaving cert course in Ballyfermot Senior College in Art, Design and Media Studies, it was its second year up and running and I spent the year drawing animal skulls and driftwood. The media studies lecturer, Brian O Neill introduced us to philosophy, I became familiar with the existentialists and other pontificators.
I developed a liking for Colin Wilson, whose self-education I admired. With a stronger portfolio, and a little knowledge under my belt, I thought I was a sure thing for college. I was called for interview in the three main art colleges in Dublin. In the National College of Art, and each year, I along with the other prospective candidates, were made draw an upturned bicycle.
The interview appeared bizarre to me with questions like, “why didn’t you put the faces on your life drawing?” I didn’t have time, I answered, unsure of the correct response. I told them I wanted to learn about anatomy to improve my drawing. One of the lecturers left the table, I wasn’t aware that they didn’t teach it there anymore, or cast drawing either, not since the student revolutions in the 60s, when students destroyed most of them.
Years later, my lecturer Michael Kane, told us that he had saved one and that he enjoyed drawing the casts himself, in the cast room. I left the interview feeling dismissed, as if they thought my idea of art college anachronistic.
The interview in the Dublin Institute of Technology was much more successful. During my year in Ballyfermot Senior college, I had gone to every exhibition in Dublin. Most notable, and the one that had the greatest impact on me was “Life Drawing” by Patrick Graham. He had mixed media pieces with torn pages from notebooks with existential musings about feeling like an outsider.
I left the Lincoln Gallery with the lasting impression that I had seen the work of a real artist. Here he was sitting across from me as part of my interview panel. I had written a script for media studies, that was never filmed, due to it being crap. I handed the script over for them to read. It was called “The Great Art College in The Sky” they read it in silence, which created an atmosphere so tense, that my butt clenched in anticipation. When the interview was finished, they ran out after me and told me I had a place. I think they thought we better give this guy a place or we’ll create a new Hitler.
Art college
Art college was fantastic, and the mid 80s was a great time to study painting. Neo expressionistic figurative art was powering the art world, and artists such as Edvard Munch, David Bomberg, Frank Auerbach and Anselm Kiefer, were gods. Kiefer was dealing with murky German history and Paddy Graham (my painting tutor) was dealing with Ireland’s bloody past.
We felt like there was life in painting and that it all had a purpose. Temple Bar Gallery was still a slum building but offered great opportunities for exhibitions to up and coming artists and other art events. I remember a lecture and slide show, held in the Gallery, by David Crone, with rats scurrying around behind him. I never ate from their canteen again, but it was a great place, it was home to the Independent Artist and had a welcoming, community feel.
Anyone could submit work to the shows and they didn’t have to be masterpieces, as students could, and did, submit work. Tim Cantillon, a classmate of mine, had a piece in the 1985 Independent Artists 25th Anniversary show. The 1986 exhibition, titled “The Artist and The Bomb” was fantastic, Lorcan Walsh had a powerful piece in it ‘Love Story’, which was utilised in the promotional poster. The “Woodcuts and Relief Prints” Exhibition 1988 was also memorable, and not just because I had three pieces in it, one of which was used in the publicity blurb (Dublin Event Guide, 1988: 4). My parents were too embarrassed to go to the opening because one of my woodblocks was a little controversial for Catholic Ireland.
If you can’t be crude when you are young, when can you be?
I got called for an interview on the grounds of my portfolio and did my best with my non-verbal skills to obtain a place. I failed. As stated, figurative painting ruled the roost in the early 1980s, it was easy to imagine it always would! The art world is built on tectonic plates and no one prepared us for the shifts.
Boom time changed Temple Bar Gallery and it morphed into something I didn’t recognise, something slick, efficient, competent, and something you needed an awareness of global art ideology for. It appeared to me that to succeed as an artist, you needed to be connected to a gallery, to people, and I wasn’t.
On a visit to an old college classmate’s studio in Temple Bar, I was apprehended on the stairs and interrogated by another patient of the art asylum, sorry, artist from the Gallery, who barked, “WHO LET YOU IN HERE? WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?” Times had changed, and that welcoming community feeling I loved, was lost. My friend showed me his work wearing white gloves and I left feeling out of the loop.
Over time, some artists who were painters adopted elements of performance and installation art. This was not what I wanted, I just wanted to become a better painter, a more articulate and expressive artist. I wanted to understand the language of painting and communicate something meaningful to me, through this medium. I wanted to fill the gaps in my formal art education. The artworld is great fun, but it is a game, with ever changing and elusive goalposts.
My mid-career path was directed towards teaching painting to adults in Dublin, in my own private art school, which helped me to hone my craft. During this time, I discovered Bargue Drawings, through the Gerald Ackerman text (2003), and the practice of sight size measuring, which was missing from my earlier art education.
This work and Richard Schmid’s Alla Prima (1998) became foundational texts for my evolving art teaching and artwork. Although a very worthwhile experience, running the art school left me with little time for painting practice, so in 2013, I closed the business and moved away from Dublin. Currently, I am a full-time professional artist living and working in Carlow, the heart of rural Ireland, with the physical and psychological space to create.
The artwork displayed in this website is a combination of work from life, my imagination and from photographs. Primarily I work in oils on canvas, with themes that apply humor, or not, to popular and unpopular culture, communicate a reimagined history, explore nature and the human condition, and ultimately express the excitement I feel for life, for painting, and the future.
James Donnelly.