- Thank you, Gill, and thank you to everyone for joining us for this wonderful conversation that we are about to have in relation to our Shakespeare to Winehouse exhibition. This is a fabulous show that has travelled to Canberra all the way from the National Portrait Gallery in London. It's a distillation of down from their collection of over 200,000 portraits down to a selection of 84 works. And as the name suggests, it's everyone from William Shakespeare to Amy Winehouse, it's an exhibition that encompasses the incredible richness and breadth and depth of NPG London's extraordinary collection. So we are very excited to have 16th century panel paintings in the exhibition, as well as some wonderful digital works and fantastic sculptures, some beautiful photography. And I think, yeah, there's just so many wonderful things that gives you... The exhibition gives you a really wonderful insight into the incredible depth of NPG London's collection and the amazing stories and history and art history that is represented and encapsulated in it. And I guess one of the hero works of the exhibition is the painting that you can see behind me. It's a beautiful portrait of the singer and musician, Ed Sheeran, painted by Colin Davidson and Colin is awake in Belfast. Early for him, late for us here, but he has very kindly agreed to talk to us this evening about his work, not just his portraits, but also his non-portrait work. So we're in for a really fascinating conversation and welcome, Colin and thank you for joining us.
- Jo, thank you very much indeed. It's a pleasure to be here. I suppose I should say that you're all very welcome here to my studio in County Down. As Gill was saying, from my point of view, it's a real privilege to have the painting of Ed with you all, and it's one of the... Well it's I suppose the only plus in the fact that the National Portrait Gallery in London is going through a bit of work that they can tour some work and I'm thrilled that they've chosen this particular place. What I want to do as Gill was saying is kind of go through a little bit of my career to date, focusing mainly on the portrait work. But the reason why I suppose I'm also focusing on some of the other work is because there's context to it. That's very much how I was led through to painting the human face around 12 years ago. I want to start off with a quote. This is by the author, Andrew Graham Dixon, when he was writing about the British painter Howard Hodgkin. He said it is usually a mistake to take on trust what artists have to say about their own work. There's no substitute for looking at the art itself, which invariably refutes or complicates their remarks about it. Artists' statements hold out the false promise of a dangled bunch of keys, none of which proves to turn in the lock. Now, what I'm not saying is don't pay the blindest bit of attention to what I'm saying, but what I am saying is that we need to be conscious that art is and viewing art and interacting with art is an intensely personal experience. Everybody interprets a piece of art in their own way. And that's what kind of draws us in, I suppose. So if I can just start here, I'm gonna go back to 1986 to a painting that I did of my hometown. This is the Belfast that... Not all streets were like this, but this was very much a derelict street, and I suppose I was discovering and looking at the ways in which we could explore or the magic of painting to an extent, how a two dimensional plane could become three dimensions. I suppose I was looking at the background and the mid ground and the foreground, almost quite like a stage set. And I suppose as time went on, I realised that I wanted to explore my hometown, my city more and more, and as the Good Friday Agreement came, that was 1990, that was about 12 years after this little painting was made, I was in my teens when I made this one.
- [Jo] Wow.
- I started to, I suppose, be very aware of the city and how it was changing and developing post the Good Friday Agreement here. And I went back and I just got on very high viewpoints and I painted I suppose the city, the new parts of it, the old parts of it, exploring, I suppose not just the pattern quality of what was laid out ahead of me, and the formal qualities of light and shade and space and colour and pattern, but also looking at the psychological aspect of the city as a living being. It's almost a portrait of this city. As it has changed and as it was changing from the many decades of decline during the dark days here. And also exploring paint, also looking, I suppose, at the fact that oil paint could become equivalents for what I was trying to paint. So in other words, if you have a look at this painting in particular, it's very much the thick slaby, sort of almost trialled on paint, was used for the building and the architecture and the bridges, but it felt so wrong to treat the water in that same way. So the water is treated in a very liquid way. Just constantly exploring why people make paintings, what paintings are for, and at the same time, looking at city as a portrait of sorts. I make a Belfast painting every year now. So kind of a touchstone for me. This was what I made about five years ago. And the wonderful thing about Belfast is that you can get high up on the mountains and hills kind of around it, and it offers panoramic views. And so you're never really done exploring it. As I said, it's a touchstone for me and it's kind of very much a way of me learning, I suppose, me able to discern what I've learned about paint and painting through the 12 months since the last one. This is a New York painting that I made a number of years ago as well. And again, you can see the exploration into pattern in particular, and I suppose this magical illusion that we all forget about now, since we look at photography on our smartphones, this magical illusion of being able to... Of a two dimensional plane becoming 3D. Around, I suppose two thousand and, probably five, six, I realised that I want to continue on in an urban theme, but I wanted to look at the city in a different way, wanted to bring colour into it, wanted to bring abstraction into it, wanted to bring a certain questioning of what reality is, I suppose, into it. And when I was looking in the window of a shop, I had this sort of idea that our brain filters out, our brain filters out what our eyes actually see, so when we're looking at, for instance, a pair of shoes in the window of a shop, our brain filters out the reflection so that we can see through the glass, but I thought it would be fascinating to see if I could paint both together, and that's what I decided to do. And this again is a Belfast painting of a sports shop. And again, you can just about make out the rugby ball and the sports shoes and the clothes, and you can make out the city hall in the background, but that's not really the point. The point is that throughout all of these paintings, the subject is a sheet of glass. The subject are not the people in the street or the bus going past, or the people in the cafe, the people or the subject is very much the sheet of glass. And I had this idea that it almost could be the same sheet of glass that I was lugging around the world, and basically making a painting of the same sheet of glass. Obviously I didn't do that. These are simply the windows. This is a Chicago painting. The last one was a London painting. First one was my hometown. And as time went on, these were acrylic paintings, these, and I suppose I felt that texture was wrong to build into them. What I was describing was something glossy and shiny and flat, and it was wrong to start to pick bits out and thicker paint. And with an aim to get a much more glassy surface, I started using oil paint. And this is a very, almost mechanical way of painting, where I was treating everything as an equal. There was no part of the painting that was treated differently and everything had this blended look to it as well, so that it sort of almost had a moving glassy feel to it. These paintings were all quite big, so it was almost as if you could, whenever they were up in gallery walls, it's almost as if you could actually feel that you were standing on the street, if that makes sense. Again, the traffic light, the car, the man on the street, the people enjoying coffee inside the cafe, they're all as important. And the only constant in the painting was the sheet of glass. And I became very, very aware about constant in the painting. Became very, very aware of a singular thing that I was painting, even though there was a bustle going on or the illusion, what I was really focusing on was a single subject, a sheet of glass. And I suppose really what was happening with that was science, you know. There was light reflected, light refracted, and that's what made the difference to what or how I painted that sheet of glass because of how the light was working. And that was a fascinating kind of discovery for me that actually the city, the bustling street wasn't important, the important bit was the singular sheet of glass. And that has stuck with me to this day, even when I'm making the portraits. I think that's where I was comfortable making paintings of heads because where there's a singular subject in these paintings, there's a singular subject with the heads. But how I got into the portrait painting, I suppose was largely by accident. I had made portrait paintings throughout my career before that, just maybe one a year. And they were paintings that I was commissioned to make. I didn't see myself as a portrait painter at all, but I suppose I enjoyed dipping in and out of it. I never showed them, but whenever I was making these large window paintings, I was at an exhibition and I bumped into an old friend of mine and he had changed his look. He's a Belfast performer who goes under the name of Duke Special. And he'd grown dreadlocks and he had eye makeup, and he had very quirky clothes and I thought, flip, it'd be really interesting to paint him. So I asked him if I could paint him and he said, yes, but we only got around to doing it about two years after that, I was in no rush to make this painting. And it was meant to be a one off. And this is the painting of Duke. And this was, as I say, was meant to be a one off, but I showed it at a couple of exhibitions, I won a few awards for it, and then suddenly I was getting way more attention for this one painting than for any other painting that I'd made before. And, you know, there's so many aspects of the decisions made in this one painting back in 2010 that continue to this day. The scale for instance. The size of this painting is accidental to an extent too, because I had a canvas stretched in the studio for one of my window paintings. I felt I needed to paint Duke larger than life. And I simply just grabbed that canvas that I'd stretched and started to make the painting that size. And that's the size of the painting of Ed behind you there.
- Yeah and a lot of your works are sort of what, 120 centimetres by 130 or thereabouts?
- Around that, yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, in some ways, most of the work that I've made is that size. I suppose I started thinking about that because first it worked, and secondly, I saw everybody as an equal and wanted to treat everybody as an equal. I was aware of this as a body of work. And I was also aware myself of setting boundaries in order to be free with paint. We need boundaries in life in order to be free. We need the boundary of the law in order that we can be free. So with painting, with art, we need the boundaries put in place and I suppose I very much decided to set myself the boundaries of that. But some people have criticised me for it because it sets up very much of a format to my work. But I don't mind that. I'm quite happy to work within that theme and to explore within that. And it allows you to readily compare the current painting that I'm working on with the last one, because they're essentially the same size.
- And certainly, and we'll probably get to this later, Colin, but with that, on that question of the sort of uniformity of the scale that you work at is really effective I think in terms of those series of works that you've done, the series of portraits of people from Jerusalem and the series of portraits that you did about the troubles, because it really sort of hones in on that, you know, that kind of common humanity really of these individuals as individuals.
- That is what it's all about, Jo. That's completely correct. And I'll come on and I'll talk about that. That's at the heart of this. That I suppose is at the heart from a psychological point of view of why I'm making these paintings. If I can just move onto the next one, obviously this is a close up of the painting of Duke. And actually, I'll stop and I'll talk about the more formal craft related aspects with this painting. If you have a look at the eyes in this, this is drawn directly from the way that I treated the glass. So I'm painting these eyes in exactly the way that I treated those oil paintings of the shop fronts. The hair, the dreadlocks, the flesh is treated as I would the architecture. And even the scribbly lines left in the hair are very, very much the way that I would've treated the Belfast paintings. So here was a subject that I could use in it's own right to actually exploit the subject with the aim of simply making a painting, where at this scale, the hair can become something else. The flesh can become landscape. And so I was set out in this quest to explore this. Duke introduced me to the Dublin musician, Glen Hansard and I made a painting of him. And again, you can see the exploration of, at that scale, you know, the background, the eyes are very much treated like the glass. Everything else is treated. The hair's treated differently to the flesh, the clothes are treated differently to the flesh. And I was very aware of how paint could be used to again, become equivalent. And back to that original Belfast painting that I was talking about, where the water was treated in a different way. So this was fascinating for me. It was de Kooning who actually famously said that flesh was the reason that oil paint was invented. That's not necessarily true, but from his point of view, there was nothing like oil paint. There was nothing better than oil paint to become an equivalent for human flesh. I'll talk a little bit more about that as time goes on. This is a local play wright here called Mary Jones. I became very, very aware of... I mean, you can see it with the three paintings I've shown you so far that here are people lost in their own thoughts. Here are people who aren't engaging with me. They're not even aware that we as viewers are looking at them. And I became fascinated with that also from a psychological point of view, that this was nearly the polar opposite of what a portrait had been about in the past, where we feel as viewers that we are engaging with the person. A subject is often looking straight out at us and imposing on us what to think. In some ways I wasn't wanting to impose on anybody what to think whenever they viewed the painting. They think their own thoughts. They're seemingly unaware of us being in the room.
- And that's interesting, because I've sort of read what you said in painting Ed Sheeran, you wanted to get that moment where... Capture him where it was if he wasn't even aware of your existence. And that was actually a real challenge for him as such a famous and popular performer.
- Well, it was the opposite, you know? In some ways he's used with a camera stuck in his face.
- Yes.
- And I'll come on and I'll talk about my process, particularly relating to the portrait of Ed. But yeah, it's an interesting one. And here again is that sadly and tragically, this was the last portrait that Seamus Heaney sat for. And I was very fortunate and grateful to be able to get that photograph of Seamus with the painting, because this photograph was only taken really two months before he passed away. The a little film at the time of me making this painting. Seamus was still alive, but it was just a film that they wanted to make. And what I found myself doing was digging into the surface. If you have a look at the... If you have a look at his right cheek, you can see how I've scored into it. And there's a very three dimensional aspect to the paint in this. I was very aware because Seamus' work is very rooted in the landscape. Seamus' work is about digging turf and as I say, it's very rooted in the landscape and it just instinctively became what this painting was actually about. This is another Belfast poet this time called Michael Longley, and I was drawn to making paintings of people who lived here, who were close at hand and who... It was interesting meeting people, paintings of people who were well known here as well, because that almost... The hard thing about portrait painting, which no one really tells you is that it's incredibly hard to make a decent painting of a head, but it's infinitely more complicated to make a decent painting of a head that looks like the person you're trying to paint. So in some ways, you're setting yourself the ultimate challenge as a portrait painter, because painting people who are well known, there's nowhere to hide. People will judge you on whether it looks like the person. This painting was in the BP Portrait Award. I think this was 2012. And got the public vote kind of award. So I was really pleased at that. But this also gives you an idea of the scale of the work... Well, you can see the scale of the work because you're standing in front of one, but because you're standing quite far out from it, you're not quite aware. If you were standing right beside it with your back against the wall, Jo, you would get a sense of the scale of the , here again, gives you a sense of the scale. This again is a local poet called Sinéad Morrissey.
- As a general rule, Colin, you sort of, as I noticed in your sort of output of portraits, there is lots of poets and musicians and writers, are you as an artist most drawn to those subjects, do you think?
- I mean, it's a good question, Jo. I think I wing it to an extent. I wing it to a large extent, but largely, and I'm going back to this stage, I was waiting for somebody to introduce me to someone else. The only person who I think I asked if I could paint them was Duke Special at the very start. Everybody else was introduced to me. The Glen Hansard painting was made because Duke introduced me to Glen. The lyric theatre in Belfast where a lot of my portraits hang. It was the lyric and the people within that who introduced me. So there was very much a poetic playwright musical feel to a lot of the portraits I was making at that stage. So I mean, it's since changed. And I mean, I've made probably 270 portraits since since 2010. And obviously I've been commissioned to make lots of them. I'm not gonna show you them all now, but if you want to see them all, you would realise that there's a very vast array of different types people I've painted throughout. This is the British musician, Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits fame. Dire Straits are particularly big where you... They were particularly big where you are. Australia had a big fan base for that band.
- Yeah, I remember seeing them in Sydney in 1986 and screaming myself hoarse.
- Is that right? There you are. You lucky duck. I never actually got to see them as a band live. I saw Mark live a few times, but yeah. And again, Mark was introduced to me by another musician, Paul , who knew him and I painted Paul because he was introduced to me as well. So there's this wonderful thread running through lots of the work, which I kind of love and which I kind of exploit. So going to the painting, which is behind you, Jo, this is going right back to the start. This is Ed's house. And what had happened was I had met Ed's dad first. Ed's father, just by chance. I'd made a painting of an olympian, a very famous Olympian from Belfast called Lady Mary Peters. And Mary was coming over to see the painting for the first time in my studio, and she asked if she could bring a few friends with her and who would've known that one of her oldest childhood friends who she brought with her was Ed Sheeran's granny?
- Wow.
- That's often how my career works. The oddest thing. She brought with her, her son, Ed Sheeran's dad. And I unveiled the portrait of Lady Mary and everybody was enthusing, everybody's being very polite. And I got chatting to Ed's dad, John, about me possibly making a portrait of his son. And he said, well, actually, the reason why I'm here is that Ed is playing Belfast tonight, why don't you come and talk to him?
- Wow.
- And I said, yes. And my two girls were in their teens in those days. So I was fleeting me cool with my teenage girl, and then I was able to bring them along too and introduced them to Ed. And Ed loved the work, really related to it and said that he would love me to paint him. And that's how it was done. It wasn't a commission of sort, it was just a painting. And that's how I stumble through my career. You can look back and go, well, it's amazing the people you've met as a result of doing that. Really, that's what it's been. It's been about making my best possible work at every point, getting it seen, and then, you know, it's amazing the people that come my way or the people who are introduced to me. So I want to talk a little bit now, Jo, about the process of making a painting.
- Fantastic, yeah.
- This is me in Ed's home. I normally am only afforded one sitting. The people who I paint can't afford the time of coming back to my studio again and again. And that sitting is generally two to three hours. So I spent two to three hours with Ed. We chatted. I do not want the sitter to give me their best side and look in one particular direction. I want to see how the face works. I want to see how the face works when the sitter is happy or talking about melancholic things or talking about reflective things, or even when they're being quiet. And what I'm doing is I make maybe 30 or 40 little, what I call shorthand drawings that you can just about in this photograph see an outline of Ed's head. This is just a little pen drawing and I make about 30 of those. And what it's doing is I'm just plotting the face. They're not about likeness, particularly. They're more about getting the energy and trapping that, trapping the energy of the encounter. There's a camera there as well. Photography is obviously important. And I bring my photographs and my drawings back to my studio here, where I am now, and I make the painting in the months after that. How I start whenever I come back to the studio is I start to make more finished drawings to decide which pose, which angle I want to paint. Very often I start more than one painting of the sitter with a view that hopefully I can... One will come to the fore. In Ed's case, there were actually two that came to the fore. I ended up making two finished paintings. This is the portrait, which is obviously behind you. It's quite weird seeing it here on my screen in Ireland and looking at you and seeing it sitting behind you. Or yeah. I'll go back. But that's kind of the way it's made. The way that I structure my studio practise is very... These paintings are all built layer upon layer of paint. The first, I suppose, pass, the first few days spending, blocking the painting in, as I put it, it's really quite an abstract mess to start off with. And then I set it aside and I work on another painting. And then I set that one aside and I work on another painting. I can often be working on 10 paintings at the same time. I mean, the reason for that largely is to let the paint dry, so that I can work on it again. But one of the other lucky serendipitous byproducts of me doing that is that when I bring the painting back again to the, so a few weeks on, I'm seeing the whole thing afresh. I'm seeing it as a new piece that I'm not remotely close to. And you can make decisions on the painting based on that. So that still is the way that I work to this day. Glen Hansard going way, way back to 2010, the portrait of Ed I think was around, I think that was around 2016. Glenn used the painting that I made of him on the front cover of an album, which is amazing because I've been very much a fan of Ed's work, sorry, of Glen's work. Excuse me. Just proof that we're going live here. Yeah. So coming back to this piece, Glen is particularly big in the States. He won an Oscar a few years ago, and since then, he's had a big following in the States. And I had a phone call from an attorney in the States who said that his client had seen the cover of the album, had particularly liked it, liked the painting and had also seen a painting that I had hanging in the Royal Academy in London at the time as well, and said, look, my client would like you to teach him to paint. Is there any way you could do that? And I said, look, I don't generally do that sort of thing, but let's see how it goes. And anyway, I ended up meeting this attorney's client from the States, teaching him to paint over the summer of 2012, and then making a few paintings of him. And this is the result.
- [Jo] No way.
- Yeah.
- [Jo] There you go.
- This is one of the... How I stumble in my career into these things. This isn't planned. This is a result of Brad having seen--
- [Jo] The album cover.
- And they're accidental things. In some ways the thing was never meant to be a cover of an album at all. So, I mean, in this particular painting, Brad sat for me in a hotel room. He was just off a transatlantic flight. He was exhausted, he needed his sleep. He was jet lagged. That's the Brad Pitt that I painted. And also, that's the Brad Pitt that I painted, this is the person I've been teaching to paint for a few months. And people often look at this painting, which is owned by the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. And they say, but that doesn't look much like Brad Pitt. And I say, well, when was the last time you saw Brad Pitt in a hotel room off a transatlantic flight?
- [Jo] .
- I said it flipping looks like Brad Pitt, okay? And then I made a couple of paintings of Brad. I made another one with his hair short. And this one looks a little bit more like Brad Pitt because he was less tired.
- But it really sort of speaks to that sort of discussion that we... Or that thing that we touched on a little bit earlier about people just being... Portraits are as much about humanity as they are about the identity or the popularity or the fame of the people that are represented in them. Liam Neeson here, these are just men. There's this wonderful equality about them. Yeah, it's fantastic.
- I mean, you've hit the nail on the head there completely. I'm not interested in celebrity at all. Never have been. Part of me despises it, actually. I mean, celebrity is fake. And what I suppose I'm doing is I'm... And also celebrity in the case of the people I'm painting is not self-imposed. Celebrity imposed by virtue of what their career is, what their profession is or by the outside world imposing celebrity onto them. And so, I mean, you're completely right. I mean, that's what's interesting in... Although I'm not interested in celebrity, that's what's interesting about painting people that the world calls celebrities, because as a portrait painter, it makes it fascinating, because you've got a facade to strip away.
- Yes, it must be really, really challenging.
- So what we're doing... I mean, taking the portrait of Liam that we're looking at now, Jo, and just following on from what you were saying, we were talking in the sitting about art and at one point, he was saying that he didn't have an interest in art until his wife introduced him to art. And this was just shortly after his wife had tragically passed away. And he became really moved as he was talking about his wife introducing him to art and introducing him, and that love and that passion continues to this day. And that's the portrait that I made. It's possibly one of the saddest paintings I've ever made. In some ways, it's of a grieving human being. And the fact that it's Liam Neeson is secondary to it. And I think he'd be cool with that. I think he'd be okay with that. Moving on. This is the only portrait I have made where I didn't meet the person. And I don't think I would ever do that again, I have to say. I think it's important that... I would love to now make a painting of her and see how different it would be through this. But Time Magazine saw the portrait of Brad in the Smithsonian and asked me to make a painting for the cover of Time. And I was really only given a number of weeks in order to do it. I think it was six weeks. But again, this painting is the same size as the one behind you. But it was used... I used film, I used photography and I built together a picture of this person, as I thought she might be if I were able to have her sitting in front of me. So yeah, this is a portrait of the German Chancellor of the time. This is another portrait of Michael Longley in the background. And I was invited to show the Queen and her husband and the then Deputy First Minister here. There was a seismic political event happened in Belfast. This was 2012, where Martin McGuinness, who was at one stage the commander in chief, I suppose, of the IRA here, where he met and shook hands with the Queen.
- [Jo] Wow.
- And I was invited. It was an arts event and I was invited to show the delegation my paintings. After that event, it was then deemed appropriate by the organisers, a body called, Cooperation Ireland, that maybe I should make a portrait of the Queen. And in 2016, they commissioned me to do it and I was invited to the palace to make a portrait of the Queen. And this was an incredible experience because I suppose this was the first time an Irish man had been invited to make a portrait of the Queen. So I was making an Irish painting of the Queen, which from a political point of view was a pretty huge thing. The Queen asked me beforehand what I would like her to wear. And if I'd said I want you to wear the crown and I want you to wear the robes, she would've done that. But I said, no, I would like to leave it to the Queen to decide what she wears. And in fact, she wore a green or a turquoise green day dress. There's no trappings of the crown here at all. And I think she was very aware of the enormity of an Irish painting of her, if that makes sense.
- Again, all of the exploration of what paint can do at that scale goes into this in the same way as everything else.
- And once again, just a lovely humanity about the sitter, not about her as a...
- [David] Yeah. I mean, I saw that.
- A famous, uber powerful person, but yeah.
- I saw that. I saw a woman who had just turned 90 years old. That I had the great privilege of spending a couple of hours with. But you paint what you see and you paint what you feel. And I think it's very important for me in the type of work that I make that I don't contrive that. I don't ever set out of course to be unkind, but I don't also set out to flatter as well. I try to be as honest as I can with my work. This is another Irish painting of an international politician. This is President Bill Clinton. And he sat for me in New York and he had a big input in the Irish piece process.
- And that was why I wanted to paint him. But this is him as we were talking about back home here. He became very moved about the loss in this place and about the thousands of people, the tens of thousands of people who were living with loss. So that's the painting that I decided to make of him. Very much an Irish painting of him again, and he recognised that. And speaking about the work that he did here, I want to go back to 1998 and in the middle is Senator. George Mitchell, who was Clinton's envoy here. He helped broker the Good Friday Agreement, that happened in 1998. The Irish on the left and the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair on the right. And I felt that back on reading the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, which I voted yes for, I thought, look, this is gonna be pretty good for most of us. This is gonna be a fresh start. This is gonna be the beginning of hope. But there's nothing in it for the people who suffered loss. There's nothing in it for the victims and survivors in this place. So whenever I started to make the head paintings in 2010, the portraits, I realised that I might have found the vehicle through which as an artist to explore that thing or to express how I felt. And my simple idea was to make paintings of people who were living here now, but who were daily carrying the weight of personal loss through the conflict here, the troubles here. So Silent Testimony was born. This is an exhibition of 18 portrait paintings of people who suffered loss through the dark days here, the troubles between 1969 and the Good Friday agreement in 1968 and even beyond that. Changed my life making this work. We take somebody like Johnny Proctor. Johnny only ever got to meet his father once because the day that he was born, his father was visiting the hospital, and whenever he left the hospital, gunmen were waiting for him and shot him dead in the hospital car park. And this is Johnny as he is now or as he was in 2015, whenever I made the work, but it's very much about now, it's not about the past. And these were the stories that I was encountering throughout. I wrote little inserts that just told basically the story of why the person was painted. Leaving out words like protestant, catholic, IRA, UVF, SAS. This was raw human loss. This wasn't protestant loss or catholic loss. Margaret Yeman here was working in an estate agent shop in a market town called Banbridge, and a no warning bomb went off and she was blinded. She's permanently blind. She had 100 stitches in her face from the glass. Still to this day gets fragments of glass coming out through her face. These were the stories that I was hearing. Virtue Dixon's daughter, Ruth was killed on her birthday whenever the pub that she was in, the bar that she was in to celebrate her birthday was bombed. And the roof collapsed. The DJ was playing a record. The DJ was playing happy birthday for her. And she was up on the dance floor whenever the bomb exploded. And again, Virtue's had to carry that weight throughout her entire life. Moving on then, nearing the end. I mean, obviously, to be honest with you, Jo, I could make a whole talk and frequently have done just on the silent testimony work. So much to explore. There's so much to unpack. We've toured it. We've toured it to the... We were invited to show it at the UN in New York. We showed it there. It's been in Paris, in England. It's been in Ireland. And indeed, we're open to just touring that exhibition worldwide because it tells the story of all conflict and the fallout of conflict, whatever we... I mean, we look at the obvious conflict that's happening in the world now. And day by day on the news, we're creating more people daily, just like the people I painted, and Silent Testimony. And whenever the war comes to an end, we don't know how that's going to happen or when it is going to happen, but it inevitably will. There's going to be hundreds of thousands, if not more people just like Virtue left to pick up the pieces on their own and deal with the loss of somebody having killed their loved one. This is a self portrait that I made. This was around about 2018. And this is the only portrait you'll see so far where the sitter is looking straight eyed at us. Obviously I needed that because I used a mirror and I didn't want a system of mirrors set up. I wanted just to be engaging myself. This is in the collection of the National Gallery of Ireland. To turn the tables on myself and to study myself was a rather daunting experience, I have to say. Because I was doing that quarrying. I was doing that putting away the facade on myself. And since then, I suppose I've been... I did a couple of paintings where the sitters are looking straight eyed at us as well. This is the Irish musician, Christy Moore. And again, he's engaging directly with us. And I suppose since that self portrait, I've been comfortable with making paintings of people looking straight eyed at us and engaging, and also being comfortable with increasing or decreasing the size of paintings too. I don't want to be too fixed, but you know, this painting was from 2012. Again, you can see that same expiration of landscape in the face and the window in the eyes. And I suppose what I'm doing with this is I'm looking at a human being. You see a lot of other portrait paintings, and indeed you'll be very aware of them where the whole face has been treated in the same way, or the eyes are painted the same way as the flesh is painted the same way as the background. And what I wanted to do here was just paint, and this is with all of the portraits. Paint a person, paint the human being as we engage with them. We don't engage with the tip of their ear, we don't engage with the point of their nose. We engage with their eyes. And everything else sort of blurs around the eyes whenever we're engaging and talking. And that's how I chose to paint humans. And that's how maybe in these paintings, we're able to feel a sense of attachment, possibly a little bit more because we're engaging with the sitter in that same way. This is something very new. This is something I did this year. And this is a self-portrait, but it's what I call a three dimensional painting. It's where I'm harnessing the three-dimensional quality of paint that I was using before. You can see the three dimensional quality of paint here where actually the texture of the paint is built up. And what I was doing was I was building it up to such an extent where I was using it as a medium to sculpt with. Now, there is a 3D printed, basic canvas, I suppose, beneath it, but the main sculptural aspect of it is very much built up. That's the scale of it in a cardboard box. And this is just a little film showing you, as you walk around the painting, notice I'm still calling it a painting.
- [Jo] Yes.
- [David] It's not a sculpture. It's in a box as a wall hanging. And it's deliberately meant to... It's deliberately meant to be hung on the wall as a painting. I revisited an old sitter of mine. This is Glen Hansard again, and this is again a 3D painting, which I've just finished of him. And again, this gives you an idea as to the textural quality of the paint and how it forms the sculpture.
- And at the same time, you know, very, very sort of strong relationship in terms of the expression and your handling of the paint that really sort of relates right back to the very first slides that you were showing us, the picture of Belfast that you made as a young man.
- [David] Absolutely. Completely. There is a thread that can be drawn the whole way through here, Jo. And then just to move on to my last slide, this is one that I'm working on at the minute, and it's just a friend of mine from here. She's originally from Uganda, but asked her, I just felt, I would love to paint her. I think these three dimensional paintings are gonna be paintings of people who I just know, they're not gonna be people who are well known. And I just love that idea. So, I'm gonna finish now, but I suppose, hopefully the slides show that I would give you next year would be different from this because it'll again, the work that I'm gonna do this coming year, which I don't know what it's gonna be, and I don't know what directions I'm gonna be led in, I don't know who I'm gonna meet, and that's the whole exciting part of this career, you know? So, Jo, thank you for listening and thank you to everybody else out there who has listened to me as well.
- Oh, it's been wonderful to chat, Colin and to learn more about your work. And I mean, just really fascinating. I was reading a quote, actually, that Bill Clinton said about your portrait of him and him saying that you managed to show a side of him or an aspect of him that he's normally very, very conscious of keeping hidden, he doesn't want people to know that he's questioning or that he's doubtful or that he's vulnerable in any way. And I think in the context of this exhibition, you sort of get a little bit of that from Ed Sheeran as well. And to think that he's on the wall in this section of the exhibition that deals with fame, alongside people like William Shakespeare and Charles Darwin and all of these incredible names from history, yet it works so beautifully because he's among portraits of these incredibly famous people, but showing a side of him and you have shown a side of him that is so unexpected and so unaccustomed to what it is that we expect of images of these sorts of figures that it's just such a wonderful inclusion in the exhibition and you've given us a whole new appreciation of the portrait of Ed and we're so lucky to have been able to speak to you. So thank you so much, Colin.
- Thank you, Jo, and it's a privilege to have the painting with you as well.
