Artist Mark is the man to put people in the picture

City Lives – Bernie Ní Fhlatharta meets Mark D Smith, whose portraits are on show in the City Museum

There’s only one figure-drawing class in Galway, something artist Mark D Smith finds amazing in a city famed for its arts. As soon as he realised the gap in artistic education in the city, he included it in his art classes and now My Art Class is one of the most popular in town.

He still finds it hard to believe that art students attending GMIT aren’t offered life-drawing as a subject, because in his book, it is a necessity for anyone who wants to learn how to draw.

Mark has a panel of 60 men and women, of all ages in all shapes and sizes, who pose for his students in his studios under the eaves of the Bridge Mills. He loves that the space used to be occupied for years by chanting Zen Buddhist monks and believes that there is great energy in the room.

“People leave their negativity outside the door when they come in here. There’s a very positive, creative energy in the room. I love it.”

It is certainly a welcoming space with windows that are high enough so as not to distract students from their work, as the building sits right on the River Corrib.

Mark is thrilled with the response to his portrait exhibition, currently showing in the Galway City Museum, which comes to an end next Monday, and that means his usual bubbly personality is even brighter.

You could say he has been working on the show since he came to Galway about two years ago and started photographing people he met on the street – but not just anybody, mostly people who had unusual hairstyles or wore headgear.

Most of the subjects of the exhibition are either buskers or street traders, but they are all familiar faces to anyone who regularly walks the city centre.

There’s Mark Kennedy, whose most recent campaign led to the erection of a children’s famine memorial on Grattan Beach; there’s a Polish man who speaks very little English but who spends his days on the streets, and there’s New Yorker Danny Rosen, who makes and sells his own doughnuts at the Galway Market. In fact, it started out with Danny as he always wears a straw boater.

Unlike other portraits, Mark’s subjects do not have to sit for hours. They pose for a photograph, that’s it.

Mark’s portraits are chalk pastels in the realism style, painted from still photographs he has taken and they are so realistic, they almost look like photographs.

Up to now Mark hadn’t bothered exhibiting his own work and instead concentrated on building up his art classes but once he had the ten portraits finished, he decided they should be shared with the public – and apparently, the exhibition has gone down a treat. They can be seen in the Museum foyer while upstairs is another portrait exhibition from the National Gallery.

It was a novel written by Clare-based writer, Niall Williams entitled Four Letters of Love which brought Mark to Ireland first.

“I loved that book so much. I knew nothing about Ireland, had never been and of course I headed to Clare first,” explains Mark, an English native.

Mark had run his own illustration agency in Covent Garden and basically wanted to leave the London rat race. He settled in rural Clare with his wife and sons. They bought a two-storey derelict farm house, not unlike the one seen in the series. They renovated it lovingly and even built a studio where Mark started giving art classes.

And not surprisingly in rural Ireland, Niall Williams and his wife became their closest friends. The relationship with Ireland was firmed up for sure.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.