Kenmare’s Gerard out to tell stories

As his second art exhibition draws to a close in Cork, talks to Kenmare artist, about his career so far, his need and desire to tell stories through art, his inspirations and his goals for the future.

THE first glimpse that I get of my next interviewee, Kenmare artist Gerard Sexton, is of a man beaming with pride as he sits in paint splattered clothes next to one of his paintings.

At 27 years old and having grown up in what he describes as a “hugely creative” household, Gerard is busy celebrating the success of his second major art exhibition, ‘Immersive Activities’, which is currently showing in the Bishopstown Library until September 29.

Speaking with a strong English accent which belies his childhood spent growing up near the Cork border, Gerard tells me of how he first got involved in painting.

“I certainly come from a creative family. My dad is a writer and my brother paints as well and so, in my childhood, I would always have had a piece of paper in my hand and I’d always have been painting or drawing. As a teenager then, I had some aspirations of becoming a comic book artist, and so I was always drawing characters and illustrating my own stories,” he said, talking to last Thursday.

“From here then, I went on to study art in the Crawford College of Art and Design and along the way through this degree, what I became interested in, was Fine Art painting. I sort of fell in love with a number of twentieth century painters such as Mark Chagall, Egon Schiele, David Hockney and Grayson Perry and wanted to do something along those lines,” he continued.

Having graduated with a degree in Fine Art back in 2013, Gerard has already held one exhibition based around a series of landscape paintings.

For his second and current exhibition however, Gerard said that he wanted to change up his style from the norm and he duly credits his new style to discovering a book on something called ‘Indian Miniature Painting’.

“I paint all kinds. I’ve painted landscapes and portraits and the exhibition that I have out at the moment, those paintings would be what you would call ‘fantastical paintings’ and they’d all be based on mythology and that sort of thing.”

“Immersive Activities, which is the name of this second exhibition, and this was a very unusual thing, it was two years ago and I was just finishing my first exhibition which was a series of landscape paintings when I found a book on something called ‘Indian Miniature Painting’, which is traditional Indian style of painting.”

“What happened was that I read this book and I sort of just fell in love with the style. Since then, I’ve been looking at paintings from this tradition and I’ve been doing re-interpretations of them. So the paintings in this current exhibition are based on real Indian and Persian paintings.”

“A painting that a lot of people will have seen in the exhibition and one that I think people are really enjoying is one that shows a sleeping giant (see top right hand photo on this page). It’s a painting based on a scene from Indian literature where a group of people are trying to wake up the sleeping giant.

“What I’ve done then is take this painting and turn this scene into a music festival where all these people have gathered and they’re playing all playing music in an attempt to wake the giant up. It’s sort of my own ‘modern take’ on the original painting,” he