The most recent artist in residence at Dublin’s The Doorway Gallery, Brian McDonagh is a talented painter with a passion for local culture. He’s also one of the founding members of Irish trad group, Dervish, who are currently on tour and who previously represented Ireland in the Eurovision. Inspired by his love of music, many of his paintings get their titles from Irish songs and are charged with an underlying melancholy or a longing to unwind the ever ticking clock.
The last thing I saw and loved… Marina Abramovic’s Artist is Present at MOMA was very impressive. The Sligo Wave at the Model last year also had some great work from Sligo’s best.
The book I keep coming back to is… Ulysses.
I find inspiration in… Irish culture, the Irish landscape, Irish music and song, Jack B Yeats, Sean Mc Sweeney, Basil Blackshaw, Patrick Collins and Hughie O’Donoghue.
My favourite film is… I am a sucker for sci-fi movies like Terminator, Alien or Blade Runner. Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival was great! I also like low-budget productions like Primer and The Artifice Girl.
My career highlight is… performing with Dervish at the biggest rock festival in the world, Rock in Rio, or getting to visit the Atlas experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, perhaps the most iconic building of this century — thanks to Timo and Lori.
The song I listen to to get in the zone is… ‘Rip the Calico,’ ‘The Maid of Coolmore’ by the Bothy Band or ‘There There’ by Radiohead.
The last film I recommended is… The Artifice Girl. The last book I recommended is The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker. It was very interesting.
I never leave the house without… a podcast in my ears. Lately I have been listening to Andrew Sullivan, Michael Shermer, Lex Friedman, Sam Harris and the Shakespeare and Co podcast.
The piece of work I still think about is… Guadalupe Bell by Paul Kos at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. It was very memorable. A large church bell is found in a dimly lit room. The ringing of the bell causes a brilliant flash and a vision of the Virgin of Guadalupe appears, floating in the air within the space. This image gently fades as the bell’s toll dissipates. Beautiful!
The best advice I’ve ever gotten… is to live your own life, not someone else’s.
The art that means the most to me is… Ulysses. I listen to the RTÉ 1982 production on repeat when I am painting. It’s a constant source of inspiration.
The most challenging thing about being an artist is… trying to come up with something remotely interesting and putting bread on the table.
After I finish a painting, I… feel relieved and exhausted in equal measure and usually mystified as to how I ended up with this result, as if it had been painted by someone else entirely.
If I wasn’t an artist, I would be… I can’t imagine doing anything that wasn’t creative in some fashion, I could possibly be a more conceptual artist in the line of Marcel Duchamp or Marina Abramovic. I might like to be involved in science or particle physics if I had the brains!
The magic of art to me is… with painting, I think it is to be involved in the creation of something that did not exist before I painted it. I get the smallest glimpse of what it must be like to give birth, I suppose. With music, it’s the camaraderie of playing together with friends or even people you might never have met before. Irish music is really great for that.
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