The Doorway Gallery is delighted to host an exhibition by Dave called ‘Little Kingdoms’. The exhibition will be hanging on our gallery walls in our gallery on South Frederick Street. We will also be hosting a ‘meet & Greet’ with the artist on the opening day between 2-4pm
“I have always been fascinated by places so it was only natural that in my artistic career I should gravitate to landscape painting. I love to explore new places, particularly the sense of mystery and intrigue that exists in each unknown place and the experiences we have when those spaces are experienced through the lens of atmosphere, weather and their unique light effects.
The idea of basing a whole exhibition around Island environments has been with me for a long time, the germ of it was probably planted over 30 years ago when I read the travel writer Paul Theroux’s ‘Happy Isles of Oceania’. Theroux was 50 years old, newly divorced and looking to escape somewhere to reassess and consolidate his life and so he went on a year long trip kayaking around the South Pacific Seas.
Traveling around the Islands of this country seemed appropriate at this time coming up to my own 50th year on this planet and a natural time to reflect and assess (although unlike Theroux I’m happily married and perfectly content with my life!). Little did I know when I started that the idea of solitude and self reflection would take on a deeper level of meaning with the COVID-19 pandemic.
There’s something special about islands that resonates with most people - everyone seems to have their favourite one. Many islands are considered ‘holy’ and have chapels or monasteries built on them for the simple reason that the mind is calmed and thoughts stilled in a place with such strict boundaries.
As a restless person by nature I find I calm down and slow down in my painting on an island. Once you have arrived there is literally nowhere else to go to but to stop and focus on what is right in front of you. Much of the work in this show was painted ‘en plein air’, directly in front of the subject in all the vagaries of the Irish weather.
Ireland has such a multitude of Islands that it was impossible to visit them all and I was really conscious for the project not to become a ‘box-ticking’ exercise. It was never about visiting as many as I could but about exploring each different environment and what made each Island unique. With that in mind some of the islands are tiny, some have land bridges, some I kayaked, waded or swam out to and others were much larger in scale. I was particularly interested in a few that had once been islands but changes in topography had left them landlocked. The ‘fortress’ idea extended to sea stacks and crannog’s (man made bronze age island dwellings) and in each my aim was to explore not just the place itself but my relationship to each wildly different place and my experience there.
Dave West was born and raised in South Wales and is now an Irish Citizen living in North County Dublin. He has been a full-time artist for almost 20 years. During that time his work has developed in different ways but always with a strong focus on Landscape and Still Life. He paints outdoors much of the time and takes part in plein air painting festivals as both participant and tutor, having won the Gold Mayoral Award at the international Art in the Open festival in 2017. His work is regularly represented at most of Ireland and the U.K’s most prestigious open submission shows and societies including the Royal Hibernian and Royal Ulster Academies, The New English art Club and the Royal Institute of Oil Painters and the Royal Society of British Artists. Dave West
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Meet & Greet with Dave West
Date: Saturday 28th
Time: 2 – 4pm
Venue: The Doorway Gallery, 24 South Frederick Street, Dublin 2.
The Exhibition will be on show from May 28th – June 18th
Gallery opening Hours:
Monday – Saturday 12-5pm
www.thedoorwaygallery.com
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