Figure 21 Study of a rope, pencil on paper. Darragh – Figure 20
In his efforts to represent the internal battle within the individual self, Darragh initially drew inspiration from the poetry of W.B. Yeats and the Surrealist art movement. He responded to Francis Bacon’s existential imagery and the surrealist artists René Magritte and Salvador Dalí’s work by experimenting with distortion. He made drawings in his sketchbook from his own reflection in concave reflective surfaces, including spoons.
He then researched other art styles like Expressionism and Op Art. The Expressionist work of the early 20th-century Austrian artist and poet Oskar Kokoschka particularly intrigued him. He admired the artist’s use of gestural brushstrokes and bright colours, because this had exactly the kind of energy he wanted to create in his own work.
xxiv
To create a psychological space of orderly disorder and controlled chaos in his final piece, Darragh used a combination of media and styles. In his work A Terrible Beauty (named after W.B. Yeats’s poem ‘Easter 1916’), he painted with acrylic and oil pastels and fused bright expressionist colours and gestural brush marks with the carefully executed black and white squares of Op Art.
Lucy – Figure 21
A drawing of an old piece of rope found on the beach led Lucy to create a figure with an unusual hairstyle. She is now open to new ideas as she responds to the fantasy art of Canadian artist Susan Seddon Boulet and the Art Nouveau style of artist Alphonse Mucha (see Unit 5) but her research of the fashionable Renaissance ladies’
