Artist Statement: Edward O’Kane

My artwork references the influence of O’Nolan’s youth in Strabane. The writer looks through the framing device of the windows and lace curtains of his birthplace at the townscape that surrounds it. The artworks also address the question of identity and the use of multiple personae in O’Nolan’s writings.

Edward O’Kane, January, 2019

The content and materiality of documents relating to O’Nolan’s former homes in Strabane have inspired me to create an evolving series of paintings. The documents act as a ground upon which disparate fragments can play out an open-ended narrative stimulated by O’Nolan’s novels and authorial personae.

My childhood summers were spent in Strabane, and I have lived across the border in nearby in Lifford since 1975. Examining the physical remains of houses, together with the forensic investigation of deeds, maps, plans, and correspondence relating to the previous owners of these buildings, has led me to believe that many of the descriptions of place, people, and events in O’Nolan’s novels derive from his childhood in Strabane. Many of my paintings are based on imagined views from the windows of the house where he was born.

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Macasamhail is the Irish for double or doppelgänger. O’Nolan makes use of this motif in various ways throughout his oeuvre. In Celtic tradition, encountering one’s double is a harbinger of death. The two figures in the painting are based on images of O’Nolan standing beside a window in his birthplace. The church across the road is framed within the window while the curtain motif frames the composition as a whole.

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This painting is a recent development of the painting featured on the cover of The Short Fiction of Flann O’Brien (Dalkey Archive Press, 2013).

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Artist Statement: David O’Kane

Rather than illustrating O’Nolan’s writings, my paintings form a dialogue with the ideas and absurd, surreal worlds that he created. The paintings also have a symbiotic relationship with my animated and video artworks. In some cases the paintings act as malleable props within the animated mise-en-scène; in others, the videos suggest compositions for painting.

David O’Kane, January, 2019

These three paintings feature in the animated sequence Manufacturing a Countenance. The paintings are based on photographs of O’Nolan held by Burns Library, but rather than portraying a real person, the painting process obscures and masks the original images, disrupting and distorting them into an animated face in flux. O’Nolan’s manipulations of identity are echoed in this metamorphoses.

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This painting is inspired by old Phillip Mathers, the murder victim from The Third Policeman. He is depicted in a circle of books, each with a different mask placed upon it. The image was originally conceived as the poster for the IV International Flann O’Brien Conference held in Salzburg in 2017. It has since functioned as a study for an animated sequence.

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