School Commission

I had the pleasure of being asked by my own school to make a painting for a huge red wall in our beautiful new school building. I was allowed free reign which is exciting but nerve wracking at the same time. As I have been teaching in the school for the past 19 years I had much to draw on. My mind went straight back to the first premises I had been teaching in when I arrived in for my first day. It was on the same site but the buildings were 4 prefab cabins. The school had started as one prefab on the same site surrounded by the flats of Ballymun. I wanted to put the humble prefab into this colossal new building lest we forget where it all began. We will soon have no children who remember the prefabs and so I thought I’d pop a bit of their history on the wall. So the one prefab became the focus of the painting. I chose the gold because even though the school was humble it contained the potential of the children that were educated there. The other elements include parts of the crest, the crest itself and the children. I chose the biggest canvas that Evans Art Supplies could supply which was 150 cm by 150 cm. It is the biggest size canvas I have ever worked on. I planned it all out using collage from my reference material and then drew a rough sketch of the final choice of collage onto a piece of paper 150 x 150 cm. At this point I consulted with my principal as to what he thought of the ideas I was trying to put forward. He was happy for me to proceed. So the canvas arrived at my studio as did the pandemic.

I have been working on the painting from march 2019 to when it was hung in January 2022. It went through many edits along the way. It was great to live with it for so long as things I didn’t notice one year I was able to fix much later when they started to annoy me. It is lovely to know that the painting will be there for the foreseeable future.