Artist Statement Dr Colman Casey

“Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter” – Oscar Wilde

Being asked to exhibit photographs at the Jennings Gallery was an honour that invoked trepidation and pride in very unequal measures.

The camera lens has always allowed periodic withdrawal from the analytical sanctuary of my left brain. This routine, private indulgence is now exposed: the images have been freed from their safe refuge in my camera and are now displayed in an open forum. 
To create them took hours, to capture them a fraction of a second, to store them minutes but to retrieve them years. Time passes, we take risks.

"What you risk reveals what you value." - Jeanette Winterson

Artist's Biographical Sketch

Colman is a native of Cork and a UCC graduate, with a PhD in Microbiology. He has spent most of his working life in the Food and Pharmaceutical industry and is currently working as the Administrative Director for Research and Industrial Liaison at the College of Medicine and Health in UCC. Colman is married to Ailín and they have two children Fionnuala and Eoghan.

I have had a lifelong interest in photography that has evolved in parallel with my career. I have to admit that my first camera was a Kodak box camera (modern for its time!) that mysteriously presented the image to be photographed on a raised glass window on the camera surface. The excitement of waiting for those images to come back as black and white prints is still tangible and was the primary seed of my interest in photography. My early teens heralded a Polaroid camera and my late teens, my first SLR camera, a Zenith, bought from a Russian sailor (that’s another story!). I then took a number of photography courses and began developing black and white images, buying a reservoir of developers and fixers and using the dark rooms in UCC to watch the images slowly emerge. In my twenties I bought several SLRs provided family portraits for friends. My working career, coupled with the inconvenience of film development times, relegated the hobby until the advancements of the digital age re-energised it once again. The magic of capturing that unique moment in time has never abated.