A richly varied route to his own art exhibition for microbiologist and De Dannan musician Aidan Coffey
Aidan Coffey’s exhibition ‘Súil Siar’ will be opened by singer Máire Ní Chéileachair on September 8 at the Ionad Cultúrtha, Baile Mhúirne
Michael Coffey was 92 years old before he was presented with the picture of a shipwreck off the Waterford coast which he had asked his son Aidan to paint 35 years previously.
Aidan Coffey had, it is fair to say, been busy in the interim. Not only recording with the likes of Séamus Creagh and Arty McGlynn and touring the world as accordion player with De Dannan — as well as helping to heal a 14-year rift between former bandmates Alec Finn and Frankie Gavin — Professor Coffey was also pursuing his career as lecturer and researcher in microbiology at Munster Technological University.
The time demands of musical and academic careers, coupled with family life, meant that since selling his early artwork while a UCC student, Bunmahon native Aidan’s painting skills then lay dormant over the next three decades.
It was not until 2017, during a visit to Cork by his by-now elderly father, that thoughts of painting were rekindled.
His father was “admiring an oil seascape in the dining room of the Imperial Hotel after his dinner — leaning in to look closely at the detail" says Aidan, who at that moment “got the brainwave to paint the Waterford shipwreck picture while it would still be appreciated”.
Equipping himself anew with paints and canvas, Aidan set to work and within weeks had presented his father with his painting of the Spanish ship Cirilo Amoros, stranded in 1926 on rocks at Ballyvooney, within miles of their homeplace.
The passage of 35 years did little to diminish Michael’s joy on receiving the painting, which took pride of place “across from his fireside armchair in the living room, replacing a framed print of The Fighting Temeraire for his final two years” before he passed away in February 2020.
Only months later, Ireland was plunged into Covid lockdown and painting became a “nice diversion during the pandemic restrictions”, says Aidan.
“I essentially did give it up for 35 years. It was something I’d done as a teenager but I thought I’d never do again. Life is pretty full — in fact my wife didn’t even know I painted!”
Self-taught as a painter, he admits: “I didn’t even do it in school. I was doing history but I didn’t take to it — I gave it up six months before the Leaving Cert."
“I don’t know what kind of a chancer I was but I decided I would try to do the art Leaving Cert because I knew I was good at drawing,” he says, crediting the late John Cullinan, art teacher at St Augustine’s College in Dungarvan, with encouraging him to pursue the subject.
“He strategically picked out the bits of art history that I’d need to know in order to have a sufficient amount for that section of the paper,” he says.
“I didn’t go beyond the Renaissance because I couldn’t cover the entire syllabus, but I was able to do the drawing and painting and I got an ‘A’ in the Leaving Cert.”
Following the 35-year hiatus, it was to the rural and coastal scenes of the Dungarvan area that Aidan returned for inspiration, using photographs as his starting point for paintings of Stradbally, Dunhill Castle, Knockmahon, and his home townland of Ballylaneen.
“I still go down to Waterford once a week and I take my mother on a drive around lots of the places I was familiar with as a child,” he says. “I used to photograph them, so the first paintings I did in the last couple of years were all of County Waterford, partly motivated by nostalgia, I suppose. I like painting scenes that are familiar to me, that I have a strong connection with,” says Aidan, who was encouraged by artist and former De Dannan bandmate, Colm Murphy, to put his work on public view.
Wide connections through music ensured that when Aidan began posting his artwork on social media during the pandemic he found a receptive market in Ireland, Europe, and America.
Commissions followed, as did an invitation to stage his first exhibition, which opens on September 8 in Baile Mhúirne, a place with which Aidan has forged strong musical ties during his four decades in Cork, recording 1997 album ‘Traditional Music from Ireland’ at Sullane Studios with Creagh and Seán Ó Loingsigh.
While the Waterford connection will be maintained when he plays a concert the following night with Caoimhín Ó Fearghail, Paddy Tutty, and Macdara Ó Faoláin, among the oil paintings in his exhibition are scenes tracing the River Sullane from Cúil Aodha, through Baile Mhúirne to Macroom, others featuring views of Kerry, including his old musical haunt, the Top of Coom.
- Aidan Coffey’s exhibition ‘Súil Siar’ will be opened by singer Máire Ní Chéileachair on September 8 at the Ionad Cultúrtha, Baile Mhúirne.
