When we begin
monotype on Fabriano Tiepolo 290gm
unique print, edition of 1
19 x 28.2cm, printed to edge
© David Begley 2025
Selected for 196th RHA Annual Exhibition
RHA Dublin, 25 May - 9 August 2026
David Begley is an award-winning Irish artist, filmmaker, charcoal maker, and arts educator. He works across drawing, painting, monotype, video, sound, and animation. He has exhibited widely in Ireland and internationally.
His work moves between figuration and abstraction and is often inspired by invented mythologies. To make his large drawings and animations he gathers driftwood along the Wexford coast and bakes it into charcoal, producing a deep, soft black. Flame, smoke, and breath recur throughout his monochrome works, where elemental processes become part of the image itself.
Begley is drawn to the act of discovering an image rather than imposing it, working intuitively with materials until a form begins to reveal itself. This approach is central to his monotypes, where images emerge through gesture, pressure, and chance. Figures surface from darkness and dissolve back into it, inhabiting threshold states between presence and disappearance. Hybrid bodies, watchers, and archetypal forms gather within shifting fields of black, suggesting transformation and myth.
In 2020 he was commissioned by Wexford County Council to create The Monk’s Garden, a visual art, heritage, and gardening project. During this project he began making and painting with botanical inks.
Begley is also a renowned art facilitator and tutor, known for his energy, enthusiasm, and generosity. He leads workshops for adults in museums and public art centres across Ireland and contributed to Making Charcoal for Artists by Kate Boucher (The Crowood Press, 2024).
He will facilitate Intuitive drawing at IMMA — the Irish Museum of Modern Art for National Drawing Day on 16 May 2026.
David Begley lives with his wife, artist Hanneke van Ryswyk, and their two children on the coast of County Wexford, Ireland.
David and Hanneke have established an organic vegetable garden at Curracloe NS and facilitate biodiversity walk and draw workshops in Wexford schools.
Purchase artworks by Irish artist David Begley here.
See workshops David's here