Accomplishments

Aisling Drennan’s work has recently been featured in the Royal Cambrian Academy of Art’s annual exhibition (2023) and at Gordon Ramsay’s restaurant in the Savoy Hotel, London (2021).

She received an Arts Bursary from the Women’s Irish Network in partnership with the UK Irish Embassy (2020) and was a selected artist for the Royal Ulster Academy’s exhibition the same year. Her work has also been showcased in notable exhibitions at The Shard and London Central Hall Museum (2019).

Drennan participated in a residency at the Cill Rialaig Artists Centre (2019) and was shortlisted for the prestigious John Moores Painting Prize (2018). In 2017, she was featured as Fujitsu’s global campaign artist and was a selected artist for London Irish Art (2015).

Earlier in her career, she received the Freyer Award for Excellence in Contemporary Painting from the Royal Dublin Society of Arts (2011) and was highlighted by State magazine as “one to watch.”

Artist Statement

Aisling Drennan, a Master in Fine Art graduate from Central Saint Martins, is a contemporary abstract painter whose work explores the tactile and playful qualities of oil paint.

The intention behind Drennan’s current series of floral paintings was to challenge traditional representations, moving away from the typical “pretty flowers in a vase” composition. The aim was to create floral paintings that surprise and intrigue, blurring the boundaries of floral shapes while hinting at the essence of an interior space. 

Drennan experiments with techniques such as paint scratching and layering colored pencils over thick applications of paint, adding rich texture, complexity, and character to each piece. This process creates depth, inviting the viewer to look beyond the surface and engage with the work on a more introspective level.

Drennan’s work draws inspiration from the American Abstract Expressionist movement and her background as a former professional Irish dancer with Riverdance. Artists such as Joan Mitchell, Sean Scully, and Willem de Kooning have significantly influenced the development of her art practice.

Review by arts writer & critic Anna McNay

‘It’s absolutely impossible, but it has possibilities.’

These words from the film producer Samuel Goldwyn might equally have been uttered by the painter Aisling Drennan, whose colourful, layered Abstract Expressionist-style canvases are a series of endless possibility, of unresolved experimentation, of contumacious contradictions.

Constructing and deconstructing, concealing and revealing, Drennan’s mark-making creates both chaos and structure, a concoction of intuition and organicness, submitted to analysis, until some form of resolve is determined. Never a fixed conclusion, however, or, as Samuel Beckett writes: ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’

But, to the viewer, Drennan’s paintings are far from being failures. The vast, freewheeling swathes of paint sweep you up, taking you, willing or not, on a stormy journey, a rollercoaster ride, across and deep within the canvas, destination unknown.

As painterly, or malerisch, as Drennan’s surface brushstrokes might be, there is nevertheless a depth to her canvases, with their partially visible geometric lines and boxes, drawn in charcoal, à la de Kooning, leading you within, underneath the waves, drowning you in the intense primary colours that ‘pop’ against one another in a playful, sometimes seemingly reckless, way.

‘You have to have colour and light,’ Drennan exclaims. ‘My god! And yellow is just a feel-good colour, really. It physically makes me happy to look at it.’ But reds and blues, ochres, and sometimes blacks, rear their heads as well, like animals from within, each opening a dialogue, interrupting, rejoining, and drawing the others into a spirited conversation, a song, or maybe even a dance.

The choreography is free, but there is an underlying internal logic, a set of steps and movements that may be exploited and utilised in infinite combination. Drennan paints always at arm’s length, from the shoulder and elbow, avoiding the contrivance of anything produced too painstakingly close up.

Nevertheless, there is a beautiful concentration as she works steadily, aiming for the marathon, not the sprint. ‘Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.’

The lyricism of a painting extends beyond the individual canvas, with one work leading on to the next, which is born, inevitably, out of a ‘niggling’ point of its predecessor, begun before its parent is fully matured. The process is empirical, as Drennan takes, reappropriates and develops: ‘There is no performance – it’s all one big rehearsal’. The subject she seeks to explore is the very stuff of painting itself: its materiality and physicality.

The only narrative is a narrative of process, of exploration and development from one work to the next – from one layer to the next – building up memories and traces, a series of wounds and scars, with new life blossoming afresh at each turn along the way.

A work may take months to complete, as she applies masking tape, charcoal and coats of oil paint, before removing the tape, applying more paint, often time and time again, ever reassessing, redirecting, accepting the inevitable but entirely unpredictable happy accident. In an age of digital perfection, Drennan is an artist to whom the term ‘practice’ – with all the inherent hope, failure, and possibility – truly applies.  

1 Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho, 1983

2 Gloria Steinem, American feminist, journalist, and social and political activist

© Anna McNay, 2017