Artist of the Month, November 2023 - Daniel Nelis

Daniel Nelis is an award-winning Visual Artist, Art Educator, and Curator from Donegal. Daniel studied at the University of Ulster, obtaining BA in Fine Art Painting in 2014, and a PGCE in Art and Design in 2017. Daniel has also recently completed an MA in Art History, Collections & Curating at University College Dublin. Daniel has been awarded with many significant prizes, and his works have been exhibited at the RUA, RHA, RSA, and at the BP Portrait Award annual exhibitions. Significant public commissions include creating the first ever collaborative portrait of the then Lord Mayor of Belfast in 2019.

Daniel’s paintings are animated by the everyday, finding inspiration in the worked and empty landscapes surrounding his childhood home. For Daniel, these are contemplative spaces that offer a heightened awareness of the present, making visible the incursions of time on both figure and land.

Study for an Unfinished Work #1 is part of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland art collection. The sitter for the work is artist Peadar McDaid, captured at a beach near Falcarragh, Co Donegal. The mark making seeks to register the inward contemplation coupled with the outward awareness of one’s presence that such spaces tend to conjure. The study seeks to render this negotiation through a non-hierarchical lens that affords equal scrutiny to all elements in the frame, figure and context, and by extension embracing the finitude of the figures presence.