In Simon’s Place in George’s Arcade, Dublin-based painter Kathy Tynan eats a cinnamon swirl, sips a coffee, and laughs when I ask where she finds inspiration. She explains that for the first four or five years of her career, she couldn’t understand that question.
Now, 10 years after graduating from art college and a month before the launch of her first book, Proud and Strong All Day Long, Tynan has found inspiration in simplicity. Her muses for the last few years have been Dublin and her dog, Kipper: “I almost needed to give myself licence to do something very straightforward and to be inspired by whatever was catching my eye. I had to get through all of this research and study and questioning and self doubt to allow myself to do something that was quite simple.”
Tynan rejects the pretentiousness so often associated with the art world, crediting her dog and her daily routines for the work she has produced. “For a couple of years my inspiration was based on my surrounding area, Dublin 8, and almost sometimes taking the cue from my dog. What he was looking at I would look at too”, she says.
Tynan’s work is characterised by a robust playfulness. Discussing her artistic process, she explains the perspective that allows her to create such lively pieces. “I try to channel a naive energy”, she explains. “I imagine that I’ve never seen this thing before or never had this kind of moment before, as if I’m a child or an animal or something.” She elaborates. “It’s very difficult to remove everything you know about the world and everything you know about how to paint, but I try to do that as much as possible so that it’s all new and fresh.”
After we finish our coffees, Tynan takes me to the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, where she is represented, to show me some of her work. As I admire one of her pieces, “Laughter in the Blood”, the artist explains how she comes up with her often-surprising titles. “Titles are quite a big part of my work”, she says, confessing that she often lifts her titles from literary giants: “I’ll just flick through really big, heavy texts and look for isolated sentences or little extracts of sentences and I’ll collect them up. I have a book, almost like a book of baby names. Then once something is finished I’ll try to match up a title to a painting.” Just as Tynan paints with a deliberate childlike wonder, isolating the scene at hand from her knowledge of the world around it, she lifts the words of Jean-Paul Sartre and Clarice Lispector out of their respective contexts. The result is disorienting, impactful and – to put it simply – great.
Standing in the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Tynan, almost as an afterthought, tells me about her book. “[It’s called] Proud and Strong All Day Long, which is written on that energy box over there”, she explains. She gestures out the window, and sure enough, across the street, graffitied on a rather grubby energy box, is the title of her book. When I ask about the book, she says that “it’s a book of my paintings from the last few years, and there’s a short story in it by Ingrid Lyons, who is a very special writer”.
Proud and Strong All Day Long will be available to purchase at the Temple Bar Gallery Art Book Fair between November 22nd and 29th, and launches officially on December 12th, after which it will be available to buy at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery. The book retails at €22, and I must say, if it allows us to have a record of how Kathy Tynan views the world, it’s worth every penny.
