Daniel O'Neill
Daniel O’Neill was born in Belfast. He trained as an electrician in Belfast shipyards. He exhibited in Victor Waddington’s gallery in London in 1940’s, essentially launching his artistic career. He returned to Ireland in 1960s and settled in Kerry.
As a self taught artist, O’Neill’s approach to painting is unusual. His paintings have a ‘strangeness’ about them and often depict a sad undercurrent. These evocations give his paintings a detachment from reality, a dreamlike quality and allude to his subscription to the surrealist movement. He is classified as a romantic painter, infusing his landscapes and subjects with an emotional and dramatic charge, inspired perhaps by the work of Jack B. Yeats who O’Neill would have been exposed to through the two artists shared representation at the Waddington Gallery.
O’Neill’s evocative style is characterised by his intense use of colour, his heavily worked paint and his ‘tenebrist’ use of light. The figures in his work are often discussed, as they turn up throughout his career and are now synonymous with his oeuvre. The dark brooding figures are often female, dark haired and reminiscent of Goya’s Spanish majas. Their surrealist quality is exacerbated by the use of shadow where expression ought to be. He places these figures, or indeed a figure indicative of himself, in vast infertile landscapes, or among a crowd, though separated from the other characters through clever use of colour and impasto.
O’Neill’s work is represented in many collections including the Ulster Museum, Belfast; Queen’s University, Belfast and Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery, Dublin.
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As a self taught artist, O’Neill’s approach to painting is unusual. His paintings have a ‘strangeness’ about them and often depict a sad undercurrent. These evocations give his paintings a detachment from reality, a dreamlike quality and allude to his subscription to the surrealist movement. He is classified as a romantic painter, infusing his landscapes and subjects with an emotional and dramatic charge, inspired perhaps by the work of Jack B. Yeats who O’Neill would have been exposed to through the two artists shared representation at the Waddington Gallery.
O’Neill’s evocative style is characterised by his intense use of colour, his heavily worked paint and his ‘tenebrist’ use of light. The figures in his work are often discussed, as they turn up throughout his career and are now synonymous with his oeuvre. The dark brooding figures are often female, dark haired and reminiscent of Goya’s Spanish majas. Their surrealist quality is exacerbated by the use of shadow where expression ought to be. He places these figures, or indeed a figure indicative of himself, in vast infertile landscapes, or among a crowd, though separated from the other characters through clever use of colour and impasto.
O’Neill’s work is represented in many collections including the Ulster Museum, Belfast; Queen’s University, Belfast and Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery, Dublin.
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