Image:The Proposal’, original painting in oil on canvas.150 x 100 cm
Spring 2011 will see Dan McDermott soaring to the success that has been the writing on the wall for the last few years. Having exhibited extensively throughout the UK and internationally, and being featured often in the National Press, McDermott’s work has so far proved a pretty good investment. It is soon to prove a serious investment – the artist is going to be represented by a high profile West End gallery.
All of his works are set to see an increase in value. You can see some of Dan McDermott’s work that is still available to buy over at NewbloodArt.
About Dan McDermott
McDermott is a painter of the overlooked. The painter’s extensive body of work is drawn from an expanding archive of images, frozen frames from film and television, emotionally resonant from their entrapment within the decades in which they were born and forgotten. The resulting image often seems familiar but its references are evasive, creating a sense of déjà vu, and investigating the ways in which individual significance is forged and shaped by Type.
The atmospheric paintings are expertly executed in order to contain both the dynamism of blurred photographs, and the attentive composure they rarely receive. Part social historian, part nostalgic fetishist McDermott creates paintings that estrange familiar images from the mass media, asking us to look again at lives and scenes that seem hauntingly unresolved.
“My working method begins with digital and 35mm film stills taken directly from the TV screen, or from my own ‘super 8’ cine film, which is stilled once again. Usually I choose an image to work from only at the very last minute before starting to paint.
The final choice of image is refined by several layers of processed visual media, which I capture in a fast and energetic application of paint. Often a series of paintings along a similar theme will emerge from the images but this is never planned in advance. I try to work as instinctively as possible, just reacting to how I feel at any one time. I use charcoal, oil paint, linseed, oil, turpentine and oil primed linen to
create the paintings.”
