Artists & Illustrators — June 2017

Artists & Illustrators 71

MASTERCLASS

& Co’s glaze medium and turpentine to thin paint. Comparing

his technique to a watercolourist, he allows the linen’s

texture to show, creating an ethereal, translucent quality.

He creates a precise sketch on the canvas before

applying a rich ground in a strong red or green. When

painting his friend Karl in his recent work Horsemeat Disco,

he allowed the Alizarin Crimson underpainting to shine

through his beard, only adding paint to describe the

highlights of facial hair. This raw style is accentuated by the

‘unfinished’ quality of his artwork. By dripping paint instead

of finishing an edge with his sharp, square brushes or

leaving white space, he invites the viewer to complete the

picture. This is best seen in new work Kangaroo, where the

figure’s lower half melds into the background, leaving the

viewer wanting more, reverting their eyes to the detail to

make sense of the crumbling composition. “You have

moments of very tight observation, but they don’t

necessarily need details around them,” he explains. We

need to search for clues within the paintings: every artwork

tells a snippet of a story, with a figure draped across a

piece of furniture – their veiled eyes disclosing nothing but

intrigue. Clothing and objects, collected over the years from

vintage fairs, create a timeless environment in which to

build an open-ended narrative, from his friend’s spare

military uniform to sumptuous fabrics reminiscent of work

by 17th-century artists such as Van Dyck, as with

Horsemeat Disco’s swathe of orange cloth.

It was an obsession with fibres that drew Diarmuid to

tackle a carpet of leaves in Kangaroo, in which he

described the autumn foliage using the underpainting, a

very sharp brush and the textured linen surface. His next

challenge was a velvet green sofa in Forty-One False

Starts. “Velvet is very difficult as it is reflective – it has a

split personality. It picks up two different colours at the

ABOVE Kangaroo

(detail),

oil on linen,

81x122cm

LEFT Untitled

(Black Grapes),

oil on linen,

30.5x30.5cm

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Horsemeat Disco,

(detail), oil on

> linen, 166x142cm

69 Diarmuid Kelley.indd 71 10/04/2017 11:01