Cork In 50 Artworks, No 39: Fin Dac’s mural on the Kino, Washington St
Fin Dac, aka Finbarr Notte, is from Togher in Cork. Picture: Larry Cummins
Fin Dac is the pseudonym of graffiti artist Finbarr Notte, a native of Togher, Cork who now lives in London. Dac has painted murals all over the world, but only one in Cork. The mural, on the Kino on Washington St, came into being in May 2014, after a group of teenagers had reopened the former arthouse cinema as a café and music venue. It featured an Asian girl lying on her side in a Frank and Walters t-shirt, and remained in place until September 2017, when the venue changed hands and it was painted over.
The project was suggested by the artist’s brother Stanley Notte, a spoken word artist and poet.
“The guys who ran the place knew Stanley’s son,” says Dac. “They had Stanley come in and do some poetry nights, and he asked if they could get permission for me to paint the mural.”
When the project got the go-ahead, Dac measured the building and began working out his ideas. “I rarely work in a landscape format, but the Kino is long and low, so the painting I designed is eight metres long and three metres high, and the model is lying on her side.”
He generally has his models supply their own photographs. “I don’t like doing photoshoots, mainly because most of my models are young girls, and I don’t want them to be in a situation where they might be uneasy about the intention. So what I do is I ask them to send me photos I can work with. They can be selfies taken on their phones or professional photos; it doesn’t really matter because I’ll piece them together with up to ten other images.
“The model for the Kino project is named Marlene. I specifically got Marlene and her boyfriend to take photos of her lying in a particular way so that I could then adapt the image to the building.”
The French woman has gone on to model for several more of Fin Dac's pieces, and was delighted to see the Kino mural on a visit to Cork. “When I arrived in the street where the mural is located, I first saw it from far and I was surprised at the size of this painting,” says Marlene Boye.
“It's always more impressive in real life than in photos. Seeing my face big on this wall means a lot to me and the paint finishes were beautiful. Passersby recognised me when I posed next to the work and one of them told me that he lived in the neighborhood, and that seeing this wall every day brightened up his days!”
Boye is philosophical about the piece's demise. “I had a little twinge in my heart to know that the wall had been covered, but street art is often ephemeral in nature, and that's what is beautiful, it reflects life where nothing is fixed, it's always on the move!”
Fin Dac photoshopped the image of the Frank and Walters t-shirt onto the model’s torso, along with a tattoo on her arm that refers to the movie, Moby Dick. “The Kino had been both a music venue and a cinema, and these were things I felt were relevant to Cork. The Frank and Walters were Stanley’s idea; he knew the guys in the band. And I chose Moby Dick because it was filmed in Youghal.”
The original plan had been to paint two girls, side by side, one with a music reference, and one with a film reference. “But because of the proportions of the wall, it just wasn’t going to work. So what I did was put the film reference on the arm, for the tattoo, and the music reference on the t-shirt. When Stanley suggested the Frank and Walters, I did some research online, and I found a poster for this gig they did years ago, where Radiohead were supporting them. Every band has to start from somewhere, but I thought that was hilarious, and I thought more people should know about it.”
The Moby Dick tattoo includes images of Gregory Peck, who played Captain Ahab, and the white whale he pursued on his vessel the Pequod. “The whale didn’t have to be a great likeness, whereas the Gregory Peck character did.”
Dac remembers the mural taking three days to complete. “Paddy O’Shea, a filmmaker, filmed the whole thing. He set up a camera across the way, and time-lapsed the footage. You get the four seasons in one day that’s synonymous with Cork. There’s thirty minutes where’s it’s super sunny, and I took my hoodie off and I’ve just got a t-shirt on. Then you can see me put the hoodie back on. Then it’s raining and I have to stop. At one point you can literally see the puddles of water on the ground drying as the time-lapse goes through the day. That happened numerous times. It wouldn’t have taken me so long if it hadn’t been for the weather.
“That wall is kind of small now, compared to other work I’ve done. At the time, it was the standard size I was doing, albeit in a different proportion. But I’ve gone ten or twenty times bigger since.”
He is sanguine about his mural being painted over and replaced. “Everything’s ephemeral,” he says. “And I’ll always have the photographs.”
Up to the past few years, Dac spent most of his time travelling the world to work on his mural projects. He estimates he has completed work in at least forty countries. “The last time I was away was between September 2019 and May 2020; that’s eight months on the road, working on murals all the time. It wasn’t like I was going somewhere and coming back, I was hopping from one place to another. And what happens in a situation like that is you disconnect from everything and everyone, until your life starts falling apart.
“So the Covid pandemic was at least good for me in that it forced me to stay at home, and work on paintings and sculptures for an exhibition.” That exhibition was Afterglow/Undertow, which ran at the Gallery Different in London in October, and proved to be a great success. “There were more than 100 pieces in the show, including original paintings, sketches, collages and prints. Everything but three of the paintings sold.”
Having worked on the show for a year, Dac is happy to have taken a break over the past few months. He has made no concrete plans for 2022, beyond some tentative proposals for new murals.
“I definitely don’t want to travel so much anymore, but I do have one tentative proposal to go to Germany in April to paint two walls, one in Dusseldorf, and the other in Berlin. There’s also a sketchy proposal to paint an outside wall at the Street Art Museum in Amsterdam; if that happens, it will probably be in the late summer. Other than that, there’s two walls I can paint here in London, but again, there are no set dates.”
