self portrait in Suburbia Mixed media on panel 30x90cm 2004
Examples of a continuous ongoing series of self examining portraits . Some of the self portraits can be seen in a recent hardback book Portraitsof Oscar and Self Portraits by ChristopherBanahanon Amazonbooks.com
My latest exhibition Restless just ended at the old Courthouse Gallery, Kinvara, Galway. It was very well received with some fascinating comments . Therefore I am planning a tour of the exhibition. WATCH THIS SPACE!
OPW exhibition at Marino, Casino, Dublin until November 6th
Since the late 1990s, the Office of Public Works (OPW) and the Department of Finance, Northern Ireland (DoF) have worked in partnership organising an annual touring art exhibition. The purpose of this cross-border initiative is to create public awareness and access to artworks in both public-owned collections. The exhibitions have toured numerous venues across the island bringing both collections to new audiences. The exhibitions are based on different themes every year.
The focus of this year’s exhibition is people – the many ways they are represented in artworks and the responses elicited by the viewer. The forty-one artworks by forty artists reflect humanity and how people are portrayed throughout the collections, using a variety of media including paintings, photographs, prints and sculpture. Each artwork spotlights the vision of the artist whilst celebrating the people that make up everyday life now and in times past.
I am delighted to have Lizzie in interior portrait included in this exhibition, along with so many other fascinating and diverse portraits. *See Lizzie in Interior image below ( it’s in the unique location of the ‘China room’, a ladies dressing room).
sail away by Connor Maguire
and below ‘Tea and Cake’ and ‘The washing up’ by Joanne Betty Conlon are other interesting examples of the many fascinating portraits in the exhibition.
The Exhibition is on view during the daily guided tours of the Casino at 10am, 12pm, 2pm or 4pm or else you can view the exhibition alone between 3-5pm Wednesdays or 10-12pm Saturdays. All enquiries on 01 833 16 18 or email casinomarino@opw.ie
Now and then is book of contemporary portrait paintings of my son Oscar and some of his cousins, when they were infants and now as they appear today twenty years later and to see what became of them in their adult life. Published on KDP Amazon.com
When I undertake a portrait, I try to capture the ‘off camera’ look where the sitter is absent minded, day dreaming rather than a cheesy smile! Therefore I try to capture the vulnerability of the person to reflect the fragility of life itself.
The infant portraits were mainly painted in a wide screen format to enhance the surrounding atmosphere of their environment. And also to capture a ‘slice of life’ as if the viewer is looking into a paused film set of their lives. Giving a transfixed sensibility of a moment caught in time. Therefore I thought it would be a unique idea to ‘ fast forward’ their life’s to portray them as they are now ( though in a more formal upright portrait composition). Below Enfant 2001 Mixed media on panel 9x36cm (detail). Below that Hannah 2003 Mixed media on panel. 60x60cm .
published on Amazon.com 2023
I’m delighted to have finally published Portraits of Oscar and SelfPortraits on Amazon.com books, which is also now available in hard cover.
The book is a unique collection of the Portraits paintings of Oscar; reflecting the wonderment and innocence of infancy , adolescence and to adulthood. Reflecting the fragility of life. The second half of the book reflects on my own self portraits and how they reveal a unique link between father and son, particularly the latter Oscar portraits as a young man, where he appears similar to myself when I was that age.
Oscars painted portraits are a unique phenomenon in the 21st century as children are photographed by their parents none stop but how often do they look back on these images. Whereas I believe Portrait paintings have a far more timeless quality as they capture unique moments of their child, particularly as they are hand painted by their father, thus creating a unique bond( captured in the contemplative process of painting itself).
Published on Amazon.com
Portraits of Lissoran residents, Ballinspittle.
A Cork County Council ‘Percent for art’ Commission, by Christopher Banahan, in 2022
The objective of the commission was to facilitate community-centred creativity through collaborative activities with the Lissoran residents.
Therefore at the beginning of the project to encourage collaboration, I arranged to meet and photograph any willing resident who wished to participate. I also offered them free art workshops on basic portraiture for beginners and Mind Mapping workshop on who I am?( To help me build up a picture of the residents personality for the portrait).
I proposed to create an art project that would engage and directly benefit the Lissoran residents, in Ballinspittle, County Cork. Where I would create intimately scaled portraits of all the participating households in the Lissoran community. Encouraging the residents to install the portraits in different intimate bespoke areas of the household. Thus giving the houses their own unique individuality
I believe the completed artwork enhances and enriches the environment in a unique way, leaving a lasting legacy to future generations of Lissoran residents. The portraits give each household its own unique individuality and sense of place ( which will become clearer through the passage of time). The portraits would act as a time Capsule , or a Testament in remembrance of the first residents in the homes.
At the end of the project, an open day exhibition event to celebrate the finished portraits , will be arranged at the local community hall, where the residents will see each other’s portraits together as a unique community collective, before the residents take their individual portraits home. The event will also be a unique social warm up opportunity to meet and hopefully forge future friendship and understanding between the residents.
This book is a visual document of the completed Lissoran portrait painting.
This has been a unique collaborative creative experience for me, that I believe will directly benefit my future creative endeavour’s , particularly in creative/collaborative community engagement. Hopefully the portraits will leave a positive lasting legacy on the Lissoran residential community itself. I am grateful to them for welcoming me into their community. And also grateful for Cork County Council housing department and arts department for showing interest in my initial concept and proposal and for offering me with this unique opportunity.
Christopher Banahan
…But as a teenager i was always buying albums by the visual seduction of their sleeve designs and quiet often didn’t like most of the music ( on first playing them). Though I quickly realised the power of visual art. And dreamt how cool it would be one day to have your artwork on a book cover. I’ve been honoured enough to have been asked to do several book covers for writers and poets. Recently i was delighted to be asked by the satirical poet Kevin Higgins for my permission to use the image of the fresco portrait i painted of him ( in my Galway4040/Remains of us, Kenny Gallery exhibition )for his new book Ecstatic published by Salmon poetry 2022. The concept of the Galway 4040 exhibition was to view iconic Galway faces from a future retrospective, seen in fragmented fresco remnants. The exhibition addressed issues of identity. How would our portraits be viewed by future archivists if they didn’t know who we were in life or what were our curcumstances.
Ecstatic by Kevin Higgins @salmonpoetry 2022
I was also commissioned by the writer Desmond Traynor to paint an interpretation of Vermeer’s Astrologer though i inverted my own portrait into the image for book cover The myth of Exile and Return . l used a multi media technique of fragmented lace imprint over oil and acrylic, to create an ageing-distressed effect ( to convey the passage of time).
The myth of exile and return by DesmondTraynor @silenziopress 2004
Another interesting venture/collaboration was when AineKelly approached me to illustrate her short-stories and design the book cover for Has anyone a set of jump leads?
I had never illustrated a book before but managed to combine my recent experience of film script story boards ( after a Huston school of film M.A course in ‘production and direction’). Simplifying the images this way helped with the continuity and flow of the short stories .
This storyboard cartoon simplicity helped me with my next idea Hyson Green Memoir in the format of a ‘graphic novel’. As id been labouring with a-text version of the memoir for years. i discovered the images said more than the words!
*see Hyson Green Memoir images in earlier my blog
Lockdown for most of us was awful and something ( now that hopefully the worse is behind us) we all want to forget about and not be reminded of it. But have you ever considered what it was like for prisoners, who faced more severe form of lockdown in confinement to try and stop the pandemic spreading among prisons.
This was the subject of my recent artist-in-prison scheme workshop where i facilitated prisoners at Castlearea Prison about there lockdown experience and to try and express how they felt about their period of confinement and how they dealt with living daily in a small enclosed space.
To help them initiate ideas through art, i gave each learner a blank wooden box, where they could express their sense of confinement in side the boxes walls ( through paint or drawing) and then create images of where they go in their dreams to escape the confinement on the outside of the box.
*Below is my prototype example for the learners to help them think of ways to create imagery with the wooden box made by myself.
What always fascinates me about doing art projects with prisoners is their keen enthusiasm to make art and keep on improving what they’re started. The odd one or too may be weary at the beginning of a project, but once they find away into the mindset of the theme they become totally engrossed and committed into tacking the subject in their own unique and extraordinary way. Often baffling me with their inventive approach, that as a trained artist still takes me by surprise, in their originality and literally thinking outside the box ! Even though the prison experience is oppressive, i actually leave with a great deal of inspiration from the prisoners powerful artwork and feel i learn something new each time i work with them.
A-I-P Prototype example Prisoners lockdown experience Technique: wooden logs/ log diary by Christopher Banahan
Note: the enclosed artwork examples are only prototypes and not by the prisoners.
reference: the AIP scheme, the ArtsCouncil of Ireland.
I’ve decided to use a graphic picture book approach to my memoirs, which seems to heighten the visceral adventures I had back then. The graphic medium evokes the mad cap sense of humour kids have, which sadly fades as you get older and life gets more serious.
I’m working on a graphic Memoir based on childhood experiences that I had growing up in Hyson Green, Nottingham in the 1960’s. I want to express the freedom kids had to let their imagination run free in comparison to today’s ‘helicopter children’ , who rarely leave the house ( busy living in a ‘virtual World’ through computers ). This concept is particularly more poignant now, with the sense of claustrophobia due to the lockdowns kids are experiencing due to the covid pandemic .
Hyson Green Memoir: Illustrations below:
1. Raleigh workers cycle home( my dad worked there for a small time and used to bring us home spare bike parts that we would construct A Frankenstein Freak bike out of). The second half of drawing 1, is a car wreck that us kids turned into a den. We lived in a very industrial urban area which became the landscape of our ‘street theatre’, to let your imagination run wild.
The drawing of the small car to the right, is Mary Ma Garry giving me and my brothers a lift home from our Saturday cleaning job at her mothers boarding house for Irish workers in the building trade. We’d get 10 shillings, but not until we eat cabbage ( which we hated!). She was the only person that we knew who had a car.
The drawing bottom left is me spying on my big brother as he was ‘romancing Pat, the girl from next door’. They use to meet on the roof of the kitchen. The distant industrial scenery is a reimagining of the surrounding industrial skyline, including Shipstone’s Brewery ( which was the main iconic image of Hyson Green).
The bottom middle drawing is a doodle based on an image on myself and some of my brothers and my sister June, circa 65 ( the family grew bigger in the following years). The bottom far right image is myself and my friend Yurek attempting to make music in my bedroom at 33 Beaconsfield Street. The noise was deafening …I don’t know how my poor mother put up with it. Though this picture really belongs to the next period of growing up in Hyson Green as We were teenagers and it was the Early seventies…more of that later!
They were carefree Innocent days, though maybe that’s just me looking back with a nostalgic heart. Of course there were hard times, especially the poverty but as kids you didn’t really worry to much about that. As long as you had your friends and the freedom of theStreets to play on, you were happy as the day is long!
The image below is of going to the Saturday Matinee at Leno’s Cinema For sixpence. It was great fun but you could hardly hear anything with all the excited screaming kids messing!
A Day in the Life of an Artist during Lockdown
Christopher Banahan is a visual Artist and Art facilitator living near Kinvara, in the West of Ireland, during lockdown, with his wife Denise Ryan a Solicitor and their son Oscar, an NUI Galway Arts Graduate and 2 rescue cats John Snow and Heidi ( they came with the names!)
I tend to get up quite late since the recent winter lockdown, as I’m a bad sleeper and wake up exhausted with aching limbs now that I’m in my sixties ( I have to get up to massage the pain in my lower back every two hours through the night) . I’m also exhausted by the usual ‘obstacle dreams’…the ones where you always miss the bus or struggling to get anywhere. Maybe they’re a sign of the lockdown, though most artists I know have similar stressful dreams…and even none-artists!
I make my way guilt ridden to the kitchen, passing the sound of my busy wife making office calls. My wife Denise will have been up a few hours already, with a great deal of office work done! Since Lockdown she has been using the sitting room as her office very successfully. My son Oscar will also have been studying online for his up and coming Solicitors exams in the house office. I feel so sorry for him being stuck at home during the pandemic and never venturing beyond the county. I remember being his age travelling all over Europe inter-railing and experiencing profound moments that you never get when looking at the World through images on the internet.
I step outside the front door and take a quick intake of sea air , as we are fortunate to have a view of Galway bay and the sweeping Burren hills. Our house is designed by a Canadian architect who wanted to create a Canadian summer lodge, which is marvellous in the summer but damn cold in the winter. And it can be even harder to sleep in winter with the storm force Atlantic winds rattling through the rafters but quite comforting when you light a big fire.
I have the same predictable breakfast of a boiled egg and 2 slices of brown swelt toast with whiskey marmalade and ground black coffee. Though I should be more careful what I eat as I had my goal bladder removed a year ago. I went though a year of eating porridge and low fat everything but find it to depressing to make It during this second lockdown.
Like most artists during lockdown, I have to admit, I’ve become addicted to checking how many likes I’ve received on Instagram for my latest painting that I posted an image of the previous night. I check my emails etc to see if anybody wants commissions of art , which is usually very rare in the present climate ( though getting commissions even with no lockdown was always quiet rare for a visual artist)!
Eventually I face up to crossing the’ frontline’ to my studio. The frontline or the utility room is where our rescue cats live. They’re very affectionate but need a lot of attention being young cats. We keep them inside as we’ve had so many cats killed on the Tracht beach road outside our house and my son really loves them. And since lockdown we’ve become rather over sentimental. I get the wonderful job of cleaning their litter tray. Then after putting on a wash of clothes and a few other domestics, I finally face my studio and take a critical eye to what I painted in the fading light of the previous night. I prefer working in day light, which was great during the summer months. I even have an outdoor veranda/ terrace that faces the Burren, where I paint on really hot days. But the winter light is oppressive in the studio. Though I love it’s mess. I call it organised Caios . It was originally a garage and is a bit of a man shed, where I can delightfully loose myself in painting. Painting is a very self contained and magical act that can transform ones existence to a profound state of being, unless the phone rings or your simply in the middle of a disastrous painting that you can’t stop trying to rescue….then your glad of the phone ringing!
I only manage to get about five hours concentrated painting done as the cats get restless and want to be put down for the night as soon as it’s dark. They won’t stop crying until I lock up the studio, particularly the male Jon Snow. Who always makes me feel sorry for him, since the accident where he lost part of his tail as it got caught in a door.
I don’t stop for lunch but bring a sandwich and tea in with me ( recently I’m having toasted banana).
Presently in the studio, I am working on a series of work based on ‘an artists response to the covid crises’ which was an Arts Council Bursary Award I received during the first lockdown. It was great to receive the award as it gave me a sense of direction in my work and a sense of moral responsibility and an active role ( all be it marginal) in the community. This gave me a sense of ‘doing my bit’ by recording how vulnerable people in the isolation of rural settings felt during the lockdown ; particularly the elderly and people with an underlying health condition( as my own wife has cardiac condition). I post the progression of the Artwork on my word blog, so hopefully enlightening and informing readers with my practise. It’s great where you get a response and a reaction from a reader and to know there’s someone out there who’s life it may have effected in som small way.
Even though i have developed a reputation for portraits, i am enjoying the challenge of the new direction, creating images that reflect the isolation and vulnerability of lockdown. Much of the inspiration of the artwork comes from daily walks that I would take with my wife Denise. We go within our lockdown restricted area on our local beach, which we are blessed to have and ironically almost ignored it in pre-lockdown. We usually go at low tide. I take pictures on my smart phone of compositions of isolated people or small groups, usually from a distance. I then use these as images as references( starting points) for studio paintings. I am always looking for unusual images of figures, captured lost in thought, as if carrying the weight of the World on their shoulders. I tend to set these figures in vast empty landscapes, using an extremely wide angle composition format that reflects the vastness of the empty beach and how an individual seems fragile in contrast to the sweeping power of nature that engulfs them.
When the cats eventually ‘cry me out of the studio’, I do some art related applications online using the dining room table, as I prepare supper. I cook the weekday suppers and my wife does the weekends. I do simple meals though occasionally I surprise the family with a Shepard’s pie or a cream white wine chicken Mushroom sauce. Though I always prefer my wife’s cooking as she’s ‘old School’ with lots of traditional hearty winter meals with amazing sauces ….Mary Berry, eat your heart out! I listen to Sean Rocks Arena on RTÉ as I do my pasta dishes. I love to get as many art radio programmes on for inspiration. It helps me feel what I’m doing is worth while. As I come from a non- art working class background, where art was considered the ‘dose class at school’ and playtime for the rich. I recently got better WiFi and love listening to BBC radio 4 art documentaries when I’m painting in my studio.
My wife and I eat together in front of the telly usually watching home comfort indulgent T.V, such as the Bake-off, a Scandi-Noir ( the Bridge, Borgen), or even Portrait Artist of the Year ( which I once feature in Doing a portrait of Richard E Grant, but I’ am not in a hurry to go back on it again)!
My wife gets tired earlier than me as she’s been on the computer all day so goes to bed around 10pm. But I don’t usually feel tired until midnight, so I catch up on my emails, re-check social media ( to see what’s happening in the Art World.) I used to follow the news fervently during the first lockdown, as it was a very frightening time globally with the uncertainty of the pandemic. But now I try and avoid all the nightly covid statistics as it wasn’t helping me sleep. So I usually read a chapter from a book …a real physical book. I’ve read more books this year than the last forty. I presently reading the Narrow Land by Christine Dwyer-Hickey, as it’s partially revolving around the American realist painter Edward Hopper, who was an early inspiration. The stillness and silence of his interior and exterior settings , with their lonely people is so relevant to now.
I then commit myself to the usual nighty struggle of sleeping.
Through the lockdowns I have genuinely lost sense of time, as we all now live in a ‘Ground Hog Day‘ experience. Though in someways it has been a unique time as we’ve all been able to have more time for each other And our loved ones and learn to rediscover And reconnect with the places we live in, away from the distractions of rat race.
Plus artists have always needed ‘time outside’ the normal bounds of the 9 to 5 existence, if they’re to have any unique profound experiences to create interesting art in the first place.
Things I wished I’d known: Success is a lonely summit and theirs more wisdom gained in failure.
Best advice I’d give: Nobody loves a bragger, especially in Ireland.
Best advice I’ve been given; Learn to listen to your inner voice .Listening says more than talking.
Christopher Banahan’s artwork Portrait of Rebecca is presently included in the RHA 120th Annual exhibition, which can be viewed online on the RHA site ( until December 13th). His work can also be viewed in the Doorway Gallery ,Christmas Exhibition online www.doorwaygallery.com
Winter walks to my local Tracht beach on the Doorus peninsula, Galway, during the winter can be a chilly experience but definitely invigorating. Fortunately we are allowed to walk that distance during the new lockdown restrictions. Though its always wise to check the tides. The experience is extraordinary if the tide is out, as you can walk along way out on soft wet sand [ once you climb over the mountain of seaweed].
With the lockdown the beach has a wonderful Calming quietness Except for the odd excited dog darting into the sea as it fetches its owners ball. It’s a unique timeless experience away from the stress of the rat race, though its wise to pack a brolly as the weather can change rapidly.
When the tide is out small sand banks appear and hidden lime rocks dry out and one can get easily disorientated as the landmarks shift but that makes it all part of the uniqueness of the experience.
Below is a painting that tries to capture the isolation and loneliness of the lockdown as an oldman contemplates the sea or is he disorientated and lost at sea?
Christopher Banahan 