• Brian McAvera
  

• Hector McDonnell
  

• 
  Spring 2015
  Volume 32. No. 1

Arts Lives and Exhibitions
Arts Lives
Brian McAvera
Hector McDonnell

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Brian McAvera: You are often described as being a realist painter. Your work reminds me of John Bratby and the so-called Kitchen Sink School, who were definitely not realist in any sense other than that of the subject matter: the ordinary, everyday situation. Your treatment isn’t realist in the sense of something akin to a photographic verisimilitude. How do you describe yourself?

 

Hector McDonnell: I’ve tried, and failed! Basically what I’m trying to do is to describe an experience; usually of a place, and of people, a moment of visual excitement – an epiphany. You see something which opens your heart in some way, and any painting is an attempt to get back to that experience. In a sense I’m an Impressionist: the attempt to recapture the visual moment. Mine is a very limited palette with a minimal number of colours and I try to use them to recreate what I see or saw. It’s a love affair with colour. An important early epiphany for me was seeing a big Pop Art exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London in the late 1960s. I looked at it with great excitement and saw that I could show my own joy for the brash and rough modern world, but depict it strictly with painting. Years later I saw another exhibition in Darmstadt called ‘Realismus und Relitat’ and to my shock found that I was part of a realist movement that was truly international – Hopper, Andrew Wyeth and the group of superb Spanish realists, are the people I feel closest to. One of the best of these Spanish realist artists is Antonio Lopez Garcia but there are several others including several wonderful women.