Tom McLean, a contemporary figurative painter and illustrator who lives and works in Galway City, has won a highly commended prize for his work Note to Self at the National Gallery of Ireland’s Zurich Portrait Prize. Me Ma Healing Me by Salvatore of Lucan was announced as the winning portrait this evening at a virtual ceremony. Vanessa Jones’ portrait Cabbage Baby (Self Portrait ) also received a highly commended prize to the sum of €1,500.
Originally from Laois, Tom McLean is a Studio Artist and Co-Director of the 126 Artist-Run Gallery. He was involved with Galway 2020 European Capital of Culture and initiated the Circuit Arts Festival in Galway that same year. After graduating from the Centre for Creative Arts and Media at the Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology (GMIT ) in 2016, specialising in painting, McLean completed an additional year of study in the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHS ) School, Dublin.
He has been shortlisted for and won various awards including the Screaming Pope Prize, Hennessy Portrait Prize, the Whyte’s Award and Hennessy Craig Award. He has exhibited both nationally and internationally and his work is held in private collections worldwide.
Note to Self is a self-portrait of the artist made in his Galway studio, a sanctuary where he spent the entirety of the pandemic. His largest and most ambitious painting to date in terms of composition and content, Tom sought to push himself in terms of scale and to test his technical ability. Tom wanted to convey a sense of his personality, which is also a reflection of the space he works in – chaotic and cluttered, but with some underlying sense of order. The composition itself is but, but thoughtful. Each colour has been considered so the painting has a certain harmony overall.
As well as a prize of €15,000, the overall winning artist will receive a commission worth €5,000 to produce a new work for the National Portrait Collection. Regarding his double portrait Salvatore of Lucan said, “My mother practices sound healing and Reiki, and anytime I’m at home and feeling unwell, she offers to practice on me. I am a distant son and can be sceptical about some of the hippy stuff, but when her hands hover above me, I do feel my mother’s love, and am aware that she is trying to heal me. In making the painting I was inspired by the kind of uncanny, suspended feeling one finds in the alchemist paintings of Leonora Carrington.”
Judges for the Zurich Portrait Prize were artist Eamonn Doyle; Róisín Kennedy, art critic and Lecturer/Assistant Professor in the School of Art History & Cultural Policy, UCD; and Seán Kissane, Curator at IMMA. Commenting on their selection, Seán Kissane said, “We were delighted to be introduced to so many new artists through this process. The broad spectrum of artistic enquiry encountered here was truly impressive.”
