Diarmuid Breen: Cork artist on cloud nine for new exhibition at Lavit
Diarmuid Breen currently has an exhibition at the Lavit Gallery.
Diarmuid Breen dreamt of giving up his day job to pursue his calling as an artist.
He worked as an engineer with an environmental consultancy, and his exploration of the “routines, pressures and expectations of work” in his new exhibition of paintings at the Lavit Gallery in Cork, is based on personal experience.
Breen took his first serious steps towards becoming an artist when, aged 36, he enrolled in the BA in Visual Art Programme on Sherkin Island.
Over the next four years, before graduating in 2012, he continued working part-time, somehow juggling the demands of his job with those of his college studies.
“John Moore, my boss, is an art collector and has always been very supportive,” says Breen. “After college, I used to work with John for four months a year, and paint the rest of the time.
"But then, when I told him a few years ago that I wanted to go full-time at the painting, he gave me his blessing, along with a van I could get around in.”
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Breen and his wife Jo sold their house in Cork around the same time, and then had the good fortune to bump into a Canadian artist who offered them the use of her holiday home in Schull for the next six months.
“It turned out to be a big old Georgian house with a swimming pool, a sauna and a studio. I got Jo to take a photo of me outside, giving the thumbs up, so I could send it on to John and let him know I was doing okay.”
Jo is also a full-time artist, and the couple are now settled in Monasterevin, Co Kildare. They keep a narrowboat at the canal nearby, and also spend much of their time travelling abroad, hiking and visiting art galleries.
Breen’s engineering career brought him all over Europe, and his new paintings are partly inspired by his experiences.
“Years ago, I lived in Belgium for a spell,” he says. “I used to go around the flea markets at the weekend, and I came across these albums of old photographs. I only bought them for the albums, to be honest. I do a lot of sketchbook work and they were handy for keeping my drawings in.
"But then I started using the photographs for drawing practice. There were all these figures in the photos, and if I was in a hotel room, I’d be drawing them away in the evenings. And then, eventually, I started using those figures in my paintings, and I still do today.”
More recently, Breen spent several months working in Copenhagen.
“It was an amazing place to be. In Denmark, there’s a really good life/work balance. The working week is 36 hours, so I had plenty of time to paint when I came home in the evening. I was staying right by the sea, and the experience completely changed, colour-wise, what I do in my paintings. I’ve always used a lot of greys and sombre colours. But the landscape in Copenhagen is really flat, and the skies are huge, so I started painting these landscapes in much brighter colours, with a straight line for the horizon, and the sky above.
“It was just for my own amusement at first. But once I started doing them, I couldn’t stop. After about two months, I had 30 or 40 of these paintings lined up on the wall, and I was like, Jesus, what can I do with them?”
As it happened, Brian McDomhnaill at the Lavit had already invited him to do a solo show, and they agreed that he should continue painting in a similar vein, producing the body of work that is now on view at the gallery. Many of the new paintings feature anonymous figures in formal attire, dwarfed by cheerless office blocks or stuck in interminable meetings. Clouds are a regular motif, and his new painting even features one preserved in a glass case.
“The paintings were originally about urban living,” says Breen, “and about how we’re always under pressure, stuck to our computer screens.
"So I’ve painted the clouds as a kind of metaphor for data centres and AI, and all this fake nature, as I see it.”
One of the more striking paintings in the show is , which Breen describes as a self-portrait, though his head is obscured by a dandelion puffball.
“That came from the idea of blowing on a dandelion as you make a wish,” he says. “I think, if you have too many wishes, you may not see any of them come true. So the painting is saying, hang on to just one wish instead, and you might actually achieve it.”
Breen has certainly fulfilled his dream of becoming an artist. Not long after graduating from BAVA, he began exhibiting with the prestigious Taylor Galleries in Dublin, and he has maintained a relationship with them ever since.
“I don’t think it was necessarily about the art, it was more to do with me being easy to deal with, and turning up on time,” he says modestly. “I got into some group shows with them in 2014, and then they gave me a solo show, Existing Realities, in 2018. My last show with them, was just last year, and that was very successful, thank God.”
Breen’s last exhibition at the Lavit was a joint venture with the printmaker Johnny Bugler in 2023. He has also shown regularly in the Blue House Gallery in Schull, Co Cork, as well as in group shows at Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre and VISUAL, Carlow.
Looking to the future, he has secured a place at an art fair in Belgium in the spring.
“It’s in Ghent,” he says, “in April. There’ll be around 70 artists, and I’ll have a five by two metre wall to hang my paintings on. It will be my first time doing an art fair. I don’t know if it will come to anything, but you’ve got to try these things. I think people might relate to the Belgian figures in the paintings. Somebody might even come up and say, 'Hey, I know these people'.”
- Diarmuid Breen, A place to be is at the Lavit Gallery, Cork until October 31. See lavitgallery.com and diarmuidbreen.com
