A first-time exhibitor at the RHA Annual Exhibition, Jonathan Dalton is a worthy and exciting winner of the 2009 Ireland-US Council and Irish Arts Review Portraiture Award, reports Catherine Marshall.
Jonathan Dalton’s painting, I had imagined something more substantial (Fig 1), the winner of the fourth prize for portraiture co-sponsored by the Irish Arts Review and the Ireland-US Council at the Royal Hibernian Academy’s Annual Exhibition throws up something of a challenge to the critic, the viewer and the art historian. What is never in question is its very fine technique. The painting, in acrylic on board, is so accomplished that it beggars belief that it was painted by an artist who studied philosophy rather than painting, who is very young in his career as a painter, and who is represented at the RHA for the first time with this prize-winning work.
