On the topic of his new work Mick O’Dea tells Brian McAvera “The Black and Tans were the Bogeyman and I am looking at what the Bogeyman looked like.”
Brian McAvera: When you were a student at NCAD you worked as an artist’s model. Did this experience contribute to your approach as an artist?
Mick O’Dea: Yes. What it did was to expose me to a lot of different teachers. I saw it as part of my education. It fulfilled the curiosity I had about what it was like for a life model. Obviously I found some approaches were more creative than others, and they were the ‘models’ that stayed with me when I started to teach. I remember George Potter’s class, highly energetic with an American know-how about it. One of the reasons I got to draw people relates to Thom McGinty, the street performer known as ‘The Dice Man’, who was modelling at NCAD at the time. I was fresh up from the country, from Co Clare and he represented artistic freedom for me. I painted him for years. So it was often the relationship I had, as a student, with the individual models that triggered bodies of work. Models that excited me generated exciting work for me. What do I mean by ‘excited’? Somebody who creates an impulse or desire in me so that it becomes a necessity to draw or paint them.
