The Drunken Werewolf: A Flood of inspiration

I want to take a moment to tell you about an artist who has been exciting me so much over the past few years and whose work should be spread for everyone to enjoy, sharing is caring. So here’s to sharing my guilty pleasure with you; watch your step as you fall through the rabbit hole and welcome to the bizarre and wonderful world of Damien Flood’s artwork.

Flood graduated from IADT Dun Laoghaire in, (the college where I am still studying in my final year), but he has left us a few years passed now. Flood studied painting for four years in IADT before graduating with his degree in Fine Art in 2003 and continuing to produce numerous pieces of work. It was in these post-graduate years when I came to know Damien through a friend of my housemate where I used to live. He also agreed to submit a poster design proposal for a comedy film festival which I was putting on back in 2007. (Unfortunately conflicts of taste resulted in another design being chosen for the posters) Regardless, it was a true honour to have him produce a design specifically for something which I was involved in.

Since then he has gone on to do a Masters in Fine Art at NCAD and is exhibiting in galleries such as The White Room, Signal Art Gallery, and The Back Loft in Dublin.

His works are mostly oil on canvas paintings and a lot of them beautiful feature female portraiture, mainly those from his 2006 collections. His tour de force abstract depictions of the human form, are often somewhat contorted into strange postures or having bizarre and almost vulgar facial expressions. But it is this vulgarity to some of his earlier paintings which I often find strangely irresistible, and clearly other people are also seeing this beauty in the Dali-esque brashness to his work. His art has been gradually changing in tone throughout the years, with his earlier works illustrating darker more malevolent themes compared to his more light-hearted recent works, some of which portray organic forms and plant-life. Back in 2007 he was creating a graphic novel / comic book called “Knocked up Nikki”; a humorous illustration of tales from the life of a perturbed girl living in the seaside town of Bray, south county Dublin. He also now runs a portraiture business with a website at http://www.portraiture.ie/ With such a rich multi-faceted backlog of work already under his belt, my bets are down that there will be many more great things to come of this artist in the future. Watch this space.