Fierce Nice - Limited Edition Museum Quality Prints

I’m really proud of this association with Fierce Nice - a gallery I've long admired. We’ve been working on this for a while, to get just the right images at the best quality possible. Fierce Nice have created a wonderful (very cool!) online platform with a beautifully curated portfolio of artists and it’s just what I’ve been waiting for. All my editions are strictly limited and each print comes with a signed certificate of authenticity, just especially for you collectors out there. Digitisation was created by the incredible Copperhouse Gallery with the only Cruse Scanner of its type in Ireland.

Founded by Ruan Shiels in 2019, Fierce Nice is a Galway, Ireland-based online art gallery dedicated to showcasing the work of leading Irish contemporary artists. In addition to stocking a carefully curated range of original art, Fierce Nice works collaboratively with artists to design and produce exclusive, museum-grade fine art print editions. The gallery's goal is to support, nurture and champion today's most exciting Irish artists, while providing collectors around the world with an opportunity to acquire remarkable artworks at affordable prices. 

EAVAN BOLAND PORTRAIT

Finally giving this painting an extra archival varnish. It’s best to leave an oil painting 6mths to a year before applying this varnish, as the paint underneath needs to be completely dry. It’s now good for another 500 hundred years or so! Nice to know that her painting will live on with her wonderful writing for generations to come. The Druid Theatre Company have special plans for this piece that was commissioned to be painted onstage during the performances of ‘Boland - Journey Of A Poet’.

HAVING YOUR PORTRAIT PAINTED IS COOL (AGAIN!)

Once considered a relic of the photography era, the art of portrait painting is making a comeback _ think of it as a selfie that takes weeks to complete!

‘Irish Girl - In Preparation For A Short Summer’ 60cm x 80cm.

Excerpts below taken from The New Face of Portrait Painting By Dushku Petrovich. - New York Times Style Magazine

“For centuries, of course, portrait painting was art. But by the second half of the 20th century, it had almost disappeared. By this time, critics routinely announced the death of painting with every new technological and aesthetic innovation. First there was the proliferation of photography, then the ready-made. Then there was the internet, and social media, whose rise seemed to render the medium of painting — not to mention portraiture — completely irrelevant: Why paint someone’s picture in the age of the selfie? Most painters responded by getting weirder, more abstract, more experimental; representational figurative art was anachronistic, inert, crusty — a form of vanity exclusive to the rich. And yet portraiture — in the classic, realist sense — has become increasingly essential (and visible) in the last few years.”

“We live in a time in which reality is almost daily warped in ways that were unimaginable even 18 months ago. We have swiftly entered an era where the very notion of truth, or facts, is considered fungible. As we reassess the various power structures that landed us here, it is stabilizing and reassuring to look at the work of an artist who is clearly in control of her craft, who is able to depict a reality that is material and grounded in recognition — of seeing, in the Facebook age, a painting that looks like who it is meant to.”

“If the news of the world feels every day more like a pulpy political thriller with an unhinged plotline, painters have responded by grounding their work in observable, human reality.”