DAS Member Interview - Dott Brady
August 10th 2023 - with Sinead Lawless
Dott, how did you become interested in painting?
When I was quite young I got double pneumonia, and, in those days they had no antibiotics, no fast cures. So I was put to bed. One of the walls beside my bed was plain white, so, as you can guess, that was my first canvas. I was 6/7 at the time and I started painting on the wall. I just wanted to have a colourful wall. I thought my mother might not appreciate it but she loved it, and she encouraged me, and from then on I was encouraged to paint all the time. So the longer I stayed in bed the bigger the mural became. She bought me all the paints I needed after that. I think Santa also brought me some crayons.
Do you have any art training?
Years went by and in school obviously I loved painting so I went on to art school after that. I can’t remember who it was that was our teacher, but he wasn’t very interested in what we painted. He was more interested in looking at us. At that time George Collie was a fine artist and a lot of the students went across the road and we took classes with him.
I also went to the art school in Fribourg in Switzerland. There I studied sculpture, Italian and French. That gave me a great love of the renaissance and from school we went on some wonderful trips. We went to Rome, Florence, and Venice. A lot of wonderful places, full of gorgeous art.
I saw David by Michelangelo in Florence. Now at that time when I visited it he was in the open. Now he’s in a wonderful museum and he’s covered up and safe from the winds and rain and all the impurities. I wasn’t terribly impressed at the time but now I can see how wonderful he was. A huge marble statue.
I saw the Mona Lisa. In those days you could drive right up to the museum. My brother was driving at the time and he said “I’ll wait here at the steps” and he was allowed to do that and I ran up the steps. I spoke to the porter at the door and said “I’m just here for a minute to see the Mona Lisa”. He said “come with me” and brought me to see it. It’s such a small painting you wouldn’t believe. I remember it seemed to be at the end of a corridor. Afterwards I quickly ran back to the car. In Rome we saw the wonderful art of Tintoretto, Titian, and those are paintings I still love.
If you were to ask me, my favourite artist of those times I would say Botticelli.
Botticelli is for me out of this world. Now modern art I’m not so fond of or the modern trends
When I was very young my mother was interested in art. She wrote plays and she did a little bit of painting as well. She used to bring me to Waddington galleries which were in Dublin at the time. Later on they moved to England. In Waddington Galleries he was introducing somebody who he thought was very nouveau with the times. This was Jack Yeats. We saw some wonderful paintings although I didn’t particularly admire his work at the time. Now I know he was very special, his colours are wonderful and his forms are lovely. Anyway it’s not for me to criticise him.
What other artists do you enjoy?
When visiting abroad I always fit in a gallery somewhere. A more modern painter I would like would be Richard Ward and we have one of his paintings up there over the mantlepiece. Now he painted the stamps, all birds. He’s a wonderful artist. My husband did a lot of shooting and we had melanistic pheasants, a rather unusual pheasant. I brought them to Ward and I said would you paint something with these and I would love some white hydrangeas and so he put them in. As a portrait artist I like Sean O’ Sullivan obviously.
Does creativity run in the family?
I do have artistic children so maybe something has been passed along that I got and passed on. Roma is my eldest daughter and she’s a designer and she’s mostly involved in interiors of houses and how they should be presented. Zoë is a painter and has exhibited at the RHA. My daughter Angela is an architect and is very artistic, maybe the most artistic of all of us. She’s an OBE in England and she was presented it by Prince Charles who now is the King. She paints in oils and acrylic but her speciality at the moment is glass. She does beautiful glass work. There is an exhibition in Cork at the moment and she has a couple of pieces in. They’re pretty huge and pretty expensive. Owen is a surgeon. Hasn’t done any painting. Jackie isn’t an artist but she’s very interested in gardening and growing herbs and very involved with her children and grandchildren which makes me a great grandmother.
Can you describe your artistic process?
In life I think one has to not only ‘look’ but ‘see’. In other words you can look at something, say, ‘that’s a beautiful tree’ or whatever but have you looked at the details? Have you seen how it works? How it boughs to one side? Or a car passing down the road. Someone asks you did a car go down the road. Tell me about it. Most people couldn’t tell you anything about it except that the car went down the road. Was it green was it red, what colour was it? Was there somebody in the car? Was the car clean? Was it dirty? The person driving the car was it a lady was it a man? and those details I think are very important in looking and seeing.
I’m always looking for inspiration. If I start we’ll say with a river and a nice bank running uphill I have to wait for inspiration then to see what am I going to do but it will usually come at that stage. I find it very difficult to start but when I start something it will flow.
Once I begin the flow takes me and the main subject always comes last. You’d imagine it would be the other way around wouldn’t you?
Now currently I have a big canvas ready to go and I do want to paint a very dramatic cloudy sky. I haven’t painted very wonderful skies before, they’re just plain really but I want to do a dramatic sky and that I have to do before I do another thing.
There’s a guy called Stuart Davis and I’ve seen some of his work and he paints incredible skies. He uses huge brushes so I bought myself a big brush. I might go for it and I don’t know how it will go. I will paint the sky and then I may paint things on top of that. What I know is that the foreground will have to be a bit more dramatic. It might just be a bunch of weeds growing up through the canvas. I don’t know. I have no idea. I just know I’ve got to do a big sky and it could even be three quarters of the painting. And so it’s coming from a sense of feeling.
I use reference books. To know, for example, how many petals a buttercup has and that’s how I’ll start. Something takes over and it’s up to the painting after that. The painting does always take over.
Is it just oils that you work with?
I work with oils and have worked with watercolour and other mediums.
I saw that one of my sisters went to a porcelain painting class and I thought I would love to have a go at that. And so I went to Arklow potteries and I asked them for advice and I got powders from them. When Arklow pottery was closing, the manager rang me one day, and he said, we have an awful lot of colours if you would be interested. I loved it.
I ultimately had to give up painting porcelain as it wasnt good for my back and I gave my supplies and kiln to my daughter Angie. It’s a beautiful medium to paint with and I would recommend anyone to try it.
Disney’s Disenchanted
I had the chance to chat with Dott and her daughter Zoë about the use of their house as a set in Disney’s Disenchanted film.
Out of the blue, on the 9th March in the middle of the third lockdown we got a knock on the door asking if we would like to use the house as a set. The directors had come over from US, New Zealand, Australia and when they came out they said they would like to look at four more houses around the burnaby. Adam Shankman, the director, danced around our garden a little bit and pointed to the sky and got someone to sing with him. We were watching from the windows. An hour later they said they wanted our house and it was due to the symmetry. They could see what they could do with our house. After a few weeks of negotiations we signed the contract with them. Within an hour they banged through the hedge, brought in their lorries, and started building the set. They also brought verandas around the back and they dug into the ground 6 feet would you believe to put in a well, a beautiful well, which was ‘the portal’ for the movie. They booked a few days in June and July but it was the rainy season so a lot of scenes from Enniskerry had to be reshot.
They put up so many flowers. They decorated the exterior with Wisteria and roses up the pillars. The birds were flying in, the bees were flying in, and because the weather was so good they were knocking on the plants trying to get the pollen out. The gardeners, or ‘the greens’ as they were called, brought moss in. There were frogs jumping out of the moss, they were brought in specially. They were putting moss up around the pillars. The birds were taking the moss and building a nest. This went on for in total about 7 months
During the shoot, we were allowed to watch, they brought in a deer who went running through the hedge, they brought in two skunks, one of them went next door to play with the dog. The crew went mad running through the hedge to get their skunk back. They brought in crickets and doves. The doves wouldn’t fly. The crickets just bounced around for weeks.
They brought down sheep. The star was the sheep-dog. The sheep dog had to watch the 12 sheeps coming down the road but there was a cow in front being led by the milk maid and every now and then there was a metal track going across the road and every time they went over it their hoof would click off the metal and scare the sheep. They’d run crazy! And the whole of the front garden was a big round flower bed full of flowers and the sheep ran in and started chewing the grass but the sheepdog got them all back
The machinery! They went into one of the neighbours at the bottom of the garden and put a crane in there . It was to lift up lighting and cameras over the well in the back garden. It was as wide as the garden. They had two cranes outside for lighting and camera permanent fixtures They had one in here so wide they had to take the gates off to bring it in and it was so heavy it tore up the tarmacadam and it was a big crane for a light over the house into the back garden to light up Amy Adams singing in the back garden. The front garden was used too.
The house was always pink but they painted it much darker for the movie. They built a fairy tower onto the house.
We lived with it all for about 4 months. We had blue skies. It was amazing weather. Hundreds of people came to see the house. They had to close off the road. Any child that showed up with a princess or fairy dress I took them in and they went home with flowers. It took them a whole day to replant the flowers I gave away.
All the rooms in the house were being used for makeup and hair.
We got to meet Patrick Dempsey and James Marsden who were so sweet and we were able to get photos. Patrick Dempsey said “I hope we haven’t put you out too much”. The crew were lovely people and looked after us very well. It was quite the experience.
