Once I hopped out of the crowd onto the step in front of the window for a better view. I’m not too sure why I stopped for a closer look that morning, perhaps it was the dark winter which created a frame around the Gallery window acting as a border to the painting, mounting it on the brightly lit window. The painting was so detailed that it looked like a photograph in this setting.
I wanted to know who painted the picture in the window, maybe it was some famous artist from the renaissance period. The gentleman in the shop gave me the artist’s details. The artist’s name was Owen Rohu, I thought perhaps I could Google him or even have a look at wikipedia for some more detail, but decided to do it the old fashioned way and picked up the telephone.
Mr Rohu lives in Ireland, Westport county Mayo to be precise any further west and he would be in New York. He was born and educated in Dublin, he studied Visual Communications, majoring in Illustration, at the Dublin College of Marketing and Design.
Being unfamiliar with the artistic skills required to be in the animation business, I was surprised to hear that Mr Rohu started his career as a Background Artist with animation production company, Murakami Wolf in Dublin before moving to 20th Century Fox Animation Studios in Phoenix, Arizona.
Mr Rohu told me that as long as he could remember he had an interest in drawing and painting, “as a twelve year old I enrolled in an adult education class in drawing and didn’t feel too much out of place.”
