Okurimono

Fin DAC is an Irish-born, London-living, muralist, painter, sculptor and illustrator.

His bold and vibrant style is a far cry from the brutalist social housing in which he grew up, in Elephant and Castle. But it was in these unlikely surroundings that the
seeds of his creativity were first sown.

With little exposure to art in early life, two items captured his imagination in the home. One was an Aubrey Beardsley print, and the other was an antique Japanese tea set, given to his parents as a wedding gift.

Without positive encouragement or exposure to the world of galleries and museums, Fin DAC initially saw no route into the art industry for himself. He instead spent
his 20s and 30s working as an engineer and web developer. It wasn’t until the age of 40 that he really experienced an awakening when he picked up a paintbrush and discovered meditation in the creation of female portraiture. To quieten the “negative chatter” in his own mind, he both lost and found himself in worlds of his own design. Finding solace in the hours that he dedicated to honing his craft, it was escapism, fantasy and beauty that motivated his work.

Much like Beardsley, Fin DAC found inspiration in traditional Japanese woodblock prints, as well as being drawn to more contemporary and accessible art forms such as manga, graphic novels and science fiction. His female portraiture incorporates a variety of seemingly opposing elements, centring around women who stand between worlds, mixing traditional dress and iconography with modern attitudes.
A thread can be seen running through his portraiture conveying a sense of pride and dignity that feels almost conservative, though simultaneously suggesting a
less serious, more playful side.

The women in his portraits challenge the binary tropes that we can see of Asian women in film and television. He is not interested in simply recreating the “Lotus Flower” - a woman typically characterised as soft and submissive - or the “Dragon Lady” - a woman flattened into a similarly two dimensional, deceitful and domineering character. 

The skills that he developed around layout, perspective and scaling while working as a technical draughtsman naturally lent themselves towards the process of sharing his artwork on walls. For many years he has travelled the world bringing life and colour to grey spaces like the one he grew up in. Inspired by the Victorian Aesthetic Movement - creating beautiful art for art’s sake to escape the industrial age - he describes his outdoors work as “urban aestheticism”.

In 2020 he painted a mural entitled Quiet Moment of Contemplation in the private garden of a women’s psychiatric intensive care unit at the St Charles Centre for Health and Wellbeing in London. He has also been given permission by the Frida Kahlo estate to paint a mural of her in Mexico and has left his mark on many urban landscapes across the globe.

In the early days Fin DAC gained strength through painting anonymously, working under the moniker of a dragon logo. Today, the mask that he adorns his models with still serves as a tool for concealing and protecting certain elements - for both him and the women in his portraits - from a viewing audience. 

The distinctive mask which repeatedly features in his portraiture draws from various sources. One of these is the character of Pris from the film Blade Runner. The dichotomy of her being a pleasure model as well as a killer was something that Fin DAC found compelling. Another is the signature mask of pop star Annie Lennox, the first female androgynous icon of the 1980s. 

While the significance of the two drips falling from his mask remains shrouded in its own secrecy, not to be shared with the audience, the small dot in line with the third eye symbolises Fin DAC in his work. It stands to represent the spiritual journey that he needed and aligns him with the characters who inspire the sense of empowerment which he was searching for himself.

His most recent project, HomEage, Fin DAC pays tribute to the artists who have inspired him most, such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Patrick Nagel and Andy Warhol. Leaning
into his tendency to marry, splice and merge ideas and mediums, the resulting body of work is striking. Audiences can connect with bright, familiar visual flavours reimagined alongside woodblock imagery, whipped together with Fin DAC’s own personal flair.

His appetite for fresh new ways of expressing himself have pushed Fin DAC to continually evolve and diversify his methods. This has led to him creating a concept based
in a dystopian futuristic world around a gang of cyborg killers, known as The Girls of Dactown (GoDs) which have even come to life in life-size bronze sculptures. It’s fair to say that Fin DAC no longer struggles to find his place in the art world, because he has simply created his own.