Irish Artist’s Dark Humor Brightens Disney Festival

Veteran Irish artist Graham Knuttel faced a difficult creative challenge recently. He was commissioned to create a 9-by-4 foot painting that will hang above the fireplace at Raglan Road Irish Pub and Restaurant at Downtown Disney.

The problem: He had to figure out how to paint a smile. “That was the toughest part of all,” said Knuttel, in a telephone interview from his Dublin studio.

The painting, which will be unveiled just before the kickoff of the annual Festival of the Masters juried art show at the Walt Disney World Resort, depicts a group of revelers at a traditional Irish pub. Scattered among them are Gaelic celebrities such as writers James Joyce and Brendan Behan, and rockers Bono and The Edge.

None of them appears to be having any fun. A paranoid glare is etched into every face. But that’s Knuttel’s trademark: Subjects in his paintings are always eyeing one another, and the world at large, with suspicion. Biographers have suggested that Knuttel’s paintings reflect a difficult childhood – he had a sadistic grandmother who liked to claw the back of his neck with fingernails and threatened to lock him in a dark wardrobe when he misbehaved.

“I like to have a sense of danger in a painting,” Knuttel confessed. “And also I would think all the people I paint are outsiders.”

That’s all well and good as a motif, and Knuttel’s paintings have appealed to such celebrity collectors as Robert DeNiro, Whoopi Goldberg and Sylvester Stallone. But this is Disney World. Having pub guests unsettled by all those alarmed faces doesn’t exactly set the mood you’re trying to establish – or as Knuttel puts it, “You wouldn’t want one of my paintings in a bank.”

So, for the Ragland Road painting, he compromised by adding four children with tentative smiles to the lower left-hand corner of the painting. (Clearly nobody carded the kids.)  Knuttel also added one leprechaun. Well, at least one. “There’s more than one in that pub,” he said. “You just can’t see them all.”

Knuttel will travel to Orlando to display some of his other paintings during the festival.
For more information visit knuttel.com – Michael McLeod