LOCAL artist and vintage car enthusiast Dain Flemming from Drimma, Mountrath will reveal a four-part art exhibition titled Reflections of a World-Weary Wanderer featuring sections of paintings on Ireland, Canada, Australia and dogs in the Gallery of Divine Inspiration at Bloom HQ Mountrath on Friday.<\/p>\n
As well as being an artist who paints every day, Dain is a former secretary of the Gordon Bennett Irish classic car run, a member of Ballinakill Vintage and Classic Owners club and an avid dog lover.<\/p>\n
He recently invited the Laois Nationalist to his home to talk about his background in art and he said that he was a specialist teacher with dyslexic children in a boarding school in England in his younger years when he first discovered painting.<\/p>\n
He said: \u201cThe boarding school only served dyslexic children and it was the most expensive school in England, even more expensive than Eton. There were only 50 children there. The kids used to go home on the weekends, but I didn\u2019t, I was just hanging around this old building. The lady who was head-of-care asked me what I do on the weekends. I said that I would go into the village, buy my food, come back, do some school work and just sit there or maybe go for a drive around Suffolk as it’s a beautiful place.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe asked me if I could paint and I said no. She told me that she does and that if I went up to the local town of Bury St Edmunds near Ipswich that there\u2019s a very good art store where I could get some paints and that I could start painting. I said that I didn\u2019t know what to do and she said just get up and go painting and I\u2019ll have a look at them and guide you. I used to go to pubs and sit in beer gardens, have a couple of pints and paint what I could see. Early in the week, the lady would go through the paintings with me.<\/p>\n
\u201cAfter a year, I came back to Ireland and tried to paint here, but I was so busy trying to get jobs and working that the painting just got away from me. Then, over two-and-a-half years ago, I needed something to do, so I took out my paints and started to paint again. I found a tutor online who\u2019s paintings I really liked. She sets up a challenge for every day and now I paint every single day.\u201d When asked about his upcoming exhibition, Dain said that it\u2019s about his life\u2019s journey. He said: \u201cBecause it\u2019s about my life\u2019s journey, I called it Reflections of a World-Weary Wanderer. I was born in Canada and when I was 16, my father decided that I should get out into the world. He sent me to Australia because he had been there and he liked it. This was in 1970 and there I was on a Qantas jet flying to Australia feeling nervous and anxious. I got to San Francisco and Honolulu and it was packed with young fellas just a couple of years older than me all dressed in the American army uniform going to Vietnam. I thought no matter what Australia dishes out to me, it\u2019s going to be better than what these poor young lads are facing.<\/p>\n
\u201cI went to boarding school in Australia and boarding school there in those days was where country people got their secondary education because there were no schools in the bush. I lived with the country kids. It was great because I got to go out into the bush with them on weekends.\u201d The retrospective life in contrast exhibition features a Canada section, an Australian section, an Irish section and a section on dogs.<\/p>\n
The curator of the Gallery of Divine Intervention at Bloom and fellow artist Kevin McCann also went along to meet with Dain.<\/p>\n
Commenting about the artist\u2019s work, Kevin said: \u201cI have to admire Dain who was a teacher who took up art as a novelty to pass his time. He\u2019s made a great record of where he has travelled and the things that he has seen. He is obviously very passionate about his art and about his dogs, which can be seen through his works. His paintings are familiar in what you see and I really admire Dain for his journey and what he has come up with for his exhibition. He really is an interesting man.\u201d Everyone is welcome to attend the exhibition launch in Bloom HQ on Friday at 7pm. Refreshments will be served and the works will remain on display in the bright and spacious wheelchair-friendly corridors of the old Brigidine Convent for the remainder of the month of June.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LOCAL artist and vintage car enthusiast Dain Flemming from Drimma, Mountrath will reveal a four-part art exhibition titled…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":457346,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[442,498,499,500,501,156,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-457345","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/457345","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=457345"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/457345\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/457346"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=457345"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=457345"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=457345"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}