The Source Arts Centre Programme of Events Summer 2020 Source Arts Centre Programme Summer 2020_Med Res | Page 8

Summer 2020
“I grew up in a pub and grocery shop in the middle of Ennis”, Mick
O’Dea is telling us as he stands preparing for his solo exhibition at
The Source. We’ve been talking for a while about his love of history
and how it came about.
“The pub was frequented by a lot of ex-British Army soldiers, some
of whom would have been in both World Wars, and old-IRA
members. My uncles would have been in the old-IRA and so, we had
this mix of overheard stories about weapons and skirmishes and
battles. The pub seemed to attract that kind of clientele. And in the
front of the pub, we had journalists from the Clare Champion, who
used it as an additional ‘office’. A lot of those journalists had written
books on local history, so the pub was always a lively place with
heated discussion. I was very fortunate to have been exposed to this
and all of those things cumulatively created the interest I had.”
O’Dea’s painted works have an illustrative quality that also emerged
by way of childhood: “I loved comics – not the American science
fiction ones, but British comics like the ‘The Hotspur’, ‘War Library’,
‘Commando’, which also dealt with war. I was a bit of an anorak
about it. When I went to see films like ‘Patton’ or ‘The Battle of The
Bulge’, I would get infuriated, because the machinery used was
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The Source Arts Centre