Dermot McNevin

My work is concerned with subjective experience and is suffused with the theme of belonging. I start out by using motifs from the landscape, the human body, or the written word, as a way in to the painting.

I use paint in a visceral and expressive way to explore the tensions felt in our inner and outer worlds. My work refers to the actual landscape and imagined landscape. In exploring the hard and contradictory beauty that I see all around us, I attempt to make the paintings work in a spacious, abstract way. I believe that our reality is both constructed by ourselves and also revealed through our life experiences. Similarly my approach to painting is both additive and subtractive, physically working the paintings to both construct and reveal the experience that the finished painting will become.

"What gives meaning to this work, and what emerges from this journey is the essential awareness that there are redemptive powers in nature. The paintings and videos are orchestrated events which showcase elemental movements, each achieving their own celebratory crescendo. McNevin's art is couched in the tradition of Paradise lost and paradise regained, where ancient memory, redemption and optimism coexist. It is a challenge in the face of time and a joyous celebration of art's constant rebuke to the ravages of chaos and loss"
- Gerry Walker, Irish Arts Review, Spring 2017