Pictures by Frank Hallinan Flood

Frank Hallinan Flood.
Winner of the Mayoral Award at Art in the Open plein air painting festival 2011.

Frank is a third generation Dub whose father’s people originally hailed from Moon, County Kildare. Frank left school at the age of 14 to start serving his time to the trade of Coppersmith and Boilermaker. Within two years he sat for and passed the Irish civil service exam. Frank was a civil servant for six years.

However, from an early age he dreamed of becoming an artist and spent a lot of his spare time at one art class or another. It wasn’t until his father’s untimely death at the age of fifty-four that Frank decided to abandon the pensionable job and apply to the National College of Art and Design in Dublin. He won a scholarship for four years and thus began a life in the arts which has spanned the last thirty-one years – twenty years of which he has spent designing to many grand places e.g. New York, Los Angeles, Jerusalem, Sydney, London, Berlin, Montreal etc.. Along the way he got to work with some really fine people, such as, Brian Friel, Harold Pinter, Jim Sheridan, Tom Cruise, Martin Sheen, Richard Harris, Donal McCann, John B. Keane to name but a few.

But his heart was always tugging him back to the self expression of visual art and he decided to become a full-time painter. Since then he has had success along the way, exhibiting in various venues, among them the Royal Hibernian Academy. He has had two one man exhibitions at Skerries Mills and The Kennedy Gallery, Dublin and has exhibited in numerous group exhibitions in Dublin and the Provinces. His paintings are represented in the collections of An Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, actor Colm Meaney, theatre director Joe Dowling, John MColgan of Riverdance among many others.