“I like to feel that you can walk into it.”
John Doherty describes his style of Realism to Brian McAvera ahead of his exhibition at the Taylor Galleries in Dublin this Summer.
Brian McAvera: You address the familiar, not the unknown. Your Ireland, for example – the houses, the old garages – has the comforting presence of nostalgic memory. It’s a rectilinear Ireland, Apollonian rather than Dionysian, with a sense of faded gentility about it, a sense of order and stability with something of John Baeder’s nostalgic views of American roadside diners, or John Salt’s roadside cars. Do you recognise this description of your work?
John Doherty: Salt, I definitely loved. Baeder’s okay. I’m the urban child of the family, brought to Dublin when I was two. Mum was a Wicklow girl and dad was Kilkenny city via The North – his grandparents were the Doherty’s Bread people. So we were a three-county family who lived in Dublin and every weekend we went to Wicklow to see granddad and mum’s sisters, and every two months or so to Kilkenny to see grandma who had the Waterford Glass Shop on High Street. She was a real character!
David Davidson pays tribute to Bill Doyle, Dublin-born master photographer, who in these fond studies has left an indelible record of his country