Derval Freeman graduated from Limerick School of Art and Design in 1996 with a diploma in fine art painting. She has exhibited in several solo and group shows throughout her career and her work is in many private collections. Some of the highlights of Derval’s career was taking up an artist residency in Cill Rialaig Co. Kerry in 2007 and also she was an invited artist by the Hamilton Gallery Sligo to participate in two of their invited artist’s group exhibitions. ‘Eva Gore Booth’ and ‘Among School Children’.

Derval grew up outside Nenagh town in County Tipperary and later her family moved to County Clare. She is now settled in Co. Wicklow for the past number of years where she paints full time. She goes out walking regularly and love’s to be surrounded by nature and the open landscape. Her painting style leans towards abstract expressionism and there is an element of the figurative in the work too.

Her inspirations come from her life experiences past and present and from nature and the wonders of the universe. Her painting process almost always start’s with the drawing where she mixes loose pencil or charcoal under-drawings with layers in oils and cold wax. She is interested in how the loose under-drawings dictate the paint through shape and mark-making. She has an interest in colour too, how one colour works off the other and how monotones of lights and darks influence it. Her paint application is a mix of thickened candy-like impastos of oils mixed in cold wax, in contrast with colour transparencies that sweep across the canvas often pulling the composition into place.