Kieran's artwork showing on the wild side
And none the less interesting or enjoyable for that. In fact, there was a pleasant collegiality amongst the friends, art lovers and curious passers-by who mixed outside the old Higgins family pub which is now closed and for sale.
The Higgins family were immediately helpful when Kieran called them with the idea of using the unique curved glass windows of the Arch Bar to display what is a year's work from the Kilcullen-resident artist. Work that digitally takes the artist's imagination directly beyond even the Twilight Zone.
That TV series — of which this writer remembers the originals — used the technique of going beyond imagination to reflect common aspects of our daily lives brought to extremes, or 'bent' to an unexpected outcome.
Kieran Behan does a little more, both mixing and bending his own photographs and other images into presentations which, depending on your point of view, could be the stuff of nightmare or substance-enhanced reality shift. Or it's simply working to manipulate our thinking with his manipulation of perception.
I'm not going to show the images, or explain them, they all have captions whether you go to the Arch Bar and text your impressions from there, or simply do the virtual visit via the Facebook page 'Texting at the old Arch Bar'.
The images in the pub's windows aren't large, but they have individually impact way beyond their size, and in large format they would make enormous artistic and imaginative impression. Digital copies are available from the artist at low cost for personal use, but anyone wanting to use one for commercial use needs to negotiate.
Kieran told the Diary that it's a digital move forward from the kind of sculpture work he used to do using mainly scrap metal, producing artifacts from bits of machinery and other items which provided their own artistic message while the components were still recognisable for what they had originally been.
"I didn't know how to do this digitally until a friend at work showed me how to use Photoshop," he says. "But when I got to learn that, it opened up all this. There are themes of cats and birds, and many of the captions relate to Irish music song titles."
This writer remembers well the Captain America murals in the burger restaurant of the same name in Dublin's Grafton Street which became iconic after being painted by Jim Fitzpatrick in 1982. If some restaurant picked up Kieran's work today for its decor, it could well be a business still around and iconic in four decades' time.
If you're in Newbridge over the weekend for the JuneFest festival, take a walk on the wild side and have a look.
