PETE - STREET PAINTER

It’s been about sixteen years since I used to go to town with my parents and brother as a family outing, where we would park around Merrion Square and see the artists setting up their stations at the railings, before we would browse town – Clerys, Roches Stores, Arnotts, Easons – Dublin staples.  The square always seemed a natural backdrop for the paintings, with its Georgian doors, red brick, leafy park and statue and residence of Oscar Wilde.  It seemed like a place where history and art, the modern and the past always co-existed in an almost timeless way.   

Pete in his paintings seems to capture the old.  It’s not the modern glass high rise offices but the archways, lamp posts, Georgian doors and traditional pubs.  The picture postcard Dublin that remembers its insulated yet close-knit community that has become so much more cosmopolitan and anonymous since the birth of our late Celtic Tiger.  His comment about his journey to Mayo to tend for his boat as if it were a cow or sheep harks back to a rural heritage where we Irish didn’t have the aspirations of high-flying jobs, international travel and fat salaries but were content with what we had and looked after it.  Things were repaired not discarded in a throw away culture where transience is the order of the day.

- Ruth  Mcmahon