Cian McLoughlin Artist Painter

Faces reproduction is no more truthful to reality, what is important is to let arise the inner emotions of the portrayed subject or the message that each artist wants to instill, with his delights, his anxieties and phobia, typical emotions of our modern history.

Cian McLoughlin is a Dublin based artist. A graduate in Architecture, he went on to complete a Masters in Film Studies in UCD before dedicating himself full time to painting. His work is largely focused on the human figure. 
The most recent body of work, Tronies, was a series of abstract heads reinterpreting paintings of the Flemish Baroque and Dutch Golden Age. The first of these tronies was exhibited in the Hennessy Portrait Awards 2014 in the National Gallery of Ireland. 

Interview with artist Cian McLoughlin:

FG: If you should tell someone the story of your life, from where would you start?

Cian McLoughlin: A child who spent every waking hour drawing obsessively and a mother who always made sure there was paper and a pencil to hand. 

FG: How would you describe your art today? 

Cian McLoughlin: I’m a painter whose main subject is people - individually or, more recently, in groups. 

FG: Can you mention an artist, artwork or series of art projects that particularly influenced/inspired you in you work as an artist? 

Cian McLoughlin: Seeing Hughie O’Donoghue’s ‘Episodes from the Passion’ series was a big moment for me. It showed me just how powerful painting could be. Michelangelo’s slave sculptures too, particularly the slave ‘Atlas’. I saw both of these series when I was fairly young and they still influence me as strongly today as when I first encountered them.

FG: What is, in you opinion, the purpose of art nowadays?

Cian McLoughlin: For me I’ve found something that obsesses me completely and could occupy me until the end of time. In a broader sense I wouldn’t know how to answer that. Art is mysterious and effects everyone differently. I couldn’t imagine a world without it.

FG: Do you have a favourite quote or motto you often think about?

Cian McLoughlin: The poet Robert Frost said a poem should be ‘like ice on a stove - riding on its own melting’. That seems a good ambition for a painting too. 

FG: Do you have a dream yet to come true? If so, which one?

Cian McLoughlin: In professional terms something of this sort happened earlier this year when a self-portrait was bought by the National Gallery of Ireland for their permanent collection. I’ve been going there since I was a kid and it still hasn’t sunk in that I now have a work under the same roof as Caravaggio, Bonnard, Goya, Picasso and any number of my other heroes.    But if I have an ambition in work generally it is to be able to go to my studio for hours everyday and paint on my own terms and I’ve managed that for some time now so I’m extremely fortunate in that sense.

FG: What are your future projects? What are you working on at the moment?


Cian McLoughlin: In my current body of work I'm exploring the theme of crowd behaviour. I want to examine this powerful phenomenon that has persisted through history and across cultures, as a scaffold for our making sense of the world, saying what counts, to understand our relation to others. In this series the crowd becomes a metaphor for loss of self, a feeling of belonging and an arena for the expression of our strongest emotions. 

I’m less interested in the reasons for a crowd’s assembly or the aftermath of its activity. These paintings concentrate on the moment of oneness where, in the life cycle of the crowd, it has become the purest version of itself. The point of maximum escalation. Physical contact, pressure, compression and anonymity come together in the group to create an emergent sense of commonality which, at its most intense, challenges the boundaries of selfhood.  

'Perhaps it is only in the crowd that people cast off their petty day to day concerns and become subjects of history.’ 

George Lefebvre, a historian of the French Revolution. 

Drawing from diverse research from older, accepted ‘Classical’ theories of crowd behaviour to the work of more contemporary social scientists such as Prof Stephen Reicher, who seeks to challenge the anti-collective pathologising view of group behaviour that has dominated the field since at least the French Revolution, these works are dynamic and suggestive, hovering on the edge of abstraction. The activity the people are engaged in and its motive remain ambiguous. As it is for a participant, the crowds in this series are confusing and disorienting at times, clear and precise at others. 

Courtesy Pics Cian McLoughlin

Website artist: Cian McLoughlin