ART What lies beneath
Fantasy Hairdresser, an Imagined Space by Irene O’Neill oil on canvas courtesy of St Patrick’s Mental Health Services and the artist
“SO... any plans for the weekend? Are you going out tonight?” Those who silently mocked those hairstylists’ questions, how they might love to be asked them now. Meanwhile, Leo announces on The Late Late that his hair is a bit of a mess, yet others on TV are dyed and groomed. The blondies have not gone grey.
Last year, Irene O’Neill began researching the beauty industry and found that in Ireland €400,000 is spent every day on hair dye, shampoo, conditioner, creams. Reflecting on how “women are pressurised to look good and not to age”, she began wondering if men felt the same pressure. And so began a series of paintings “of certain spaces as gendered spaces”.
Her creative family background meant “drama, writing, making”; a grand-aunt was an artist, her youngest son a professional dancer. Herself, she “took Leaving Cert art as an extra subject” and on leaving school studied graphic and printing design, worked as a graphic designer, later a trainer and tutor but went back to study Fine Art at NCAD. Horses, scenery and ballerinas were her first subject matter but “college changed my view of the world and I think artists have to respond to what is going on around them”. Now she’s researching global warming and responding to the pandemic.
This oil on canvas, Fantasy Hairdressers, an Imagined Space, is from her graduation show last year and is one of two O’Neill works purchased by St Patrick’s Mental Health Services.
For the Salon/ Barber series, O’Neill visited Elle No 5 in Celbridge, Co Kildare, where she’s lived for 25 years, and Fades & Blades on Thomas Street in Dublin. Then, photographs, drawings, watercolours, sketches, small prototype paintings and images from interiors and architectural magazines all formed the basis for spaces real and imagined. She also uses collage, transferring them on to the canvas and, using viewfinders, she experiments to “find other images within the collage”.
Digital manipulation software allows
O’Neill to take an image, “blur it and see where the possibilities of paintings can take me”. Attracted to fluid, loose painting rather than hard-edged, photo realist work, O’Neill’s brushstrokes have a fluidity, a suggestive touch. “The colour palette is cohesive but I did use pink and used that as a play on gender.”
Here the client is reading her phone while talking to the hairdresser. “The hair salon is a place of escapism, where one is pampered, groomed, coloured, cut; have a cup of coffee, read magazines; a talk-soccer barber shop has a different vibe.” In this 2019 work “the phone has invaded the traditional chat between hairdresser and client but, with regular clients, an intimacy between stylist and client develops. Human interaction is part of our DNA; in Ireland we love a good gossip.”
O’Neill sees “the beehive, the glam rock mullet, big hair, hipster and now home cuts as a revolving wheel”. She herself has “a lovely hairdresser called Trudy”. O’Neill’s own hair “is part of me and my identity as a human being, is growing at a speed of knots, and like everyone else I can’t wait until July 20.”
Until then, tearing one’s hair out might be an option.