The Source Arts Centre Programme of Events Summer 2020 Source Arts Centre Programme Summer 2020_Med Res | Page 9

Summer 2020
Images:
Opposite page: ‘All The King’s Men’,
Oil of Canvas 150X150cm (2010)
This page: ‘Ten Shillings a Day All Found’
Oil of Canvas 120X100cm (2020)
Below: Artist Mick O’Dea
always wrong. American tanks might be used for
German tanks and so on. But that keen
childhood interest also led me to using that
strong, almost comic-book style imagery in
the eventual works I made on The War of
Independence.”
Source material is important for O’Dea. He says:
“I would find images and photographs from
national collections or archives and develop
these. I found the way that the period had been
dealt with previously had been somewhat
oblique and didn’t stimulate my imagination like
the stories I had heard as I grew up. I wanted
to find a way to incorporate the first-hand
experiences of these people – the storytelling
aspect of events. The Auxilaries and Black and
Tans have become almost like historical
bogeyman to us, but using the archive images,
we can really look at them. What ages were
they? What clothes did they wear? Why do they
have such a swagger?
www.thesourceartscentre.ie
So this is an effort to demystify them, take them
out of the cupboard and have a good look at
them.
Most of them were demobilised soldiers from the
First World War who would have been perhaps,
brutalised by their experiences in the trenches. If
you were a Black and Tan you were receiving the
highest wages of a soldier at the time. You had
cart-blanche to do what you wanted and if you
were prone to ‘not being a nice person’, you
could still operate within the system. So the
exhibition is an examination of the phenomenon
of the Black and Tans and indeed the other
people who fought in the war.”
‘The Cut of Them’ is on exhibition in The Source
gallery until Saturday April 18th
Box Office: 0504 90204
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