about rasher

Rasher (Mark Kavanagh) was born in 1977 in the seaside town of Bray, Co. Wicklow. He attended St. Killian's School and St. Thomas' VEC.

Rasher is a self-taught artist working in his preferred medium of oil paint. After attracting interest with several self-mounted shows, he held successful solo shows in Dublin and Los Angeles, gaining international publicity and appearances on the Late Late Show. He has firmly established himself as one of the most interesting painters of his generation. He continues to strive for more challenging ideas and techniques in painting.

His principal subject has always been the human figure in its natural environment, often solitary, treated with a vivid directness. Rasher takes influences from all the painters that have gone before him as well as his contemporaries. "We are really only an extension of what has gone before us. We are not original, we are only unique".

One of the most striking aspects of Rasher's developing talents is his ability to grasp the shifting, uneasy nature of relationships and their evolution. Although his strongly modelled faces openly bear the burden of their histories, they also somehow affirm a desire to go on, as if lit from within by an unquenchable hunger, and by the searching imagination of this most individual of young Irish artists.

Rasher still lives and works in Wicklow Town, Co. Wicklow.

© RASHER 2012 | design by colouringbox