I always told myself and other people (if they ask) what I would be if I was not a portrait artist. I tell them a psychologist because it parallels capturing the details/emotions of a face on paper through visual analysis and into constructing the blueprint of someone through mental analysis. Instead of paint brushes, the psychologist uses terms to describe how someone processes their thoughts and emotions that makes them the unique individual that they have become (or born into—enter the murky combination of nature versus nurture). Well, that got me thinking about my latest portrait of the Irish 90’s pop sensation Sinead O’Conner.
I was young when I heard that one song that everyone knows and saw her photographs popping up in media. I thought, “Did she have cancer or was mingling with monks"? No, she was just being Sinead—her name meaning “God is gracious” in Irish and Hebrew. And he was gracious in bestowing a worldwide platform for her to belt out her ballads and controversial opinions, things that needed to be said. She was going to be no sexy wallflower pop musician. Because of her jarring upbringing as a child she had a level of streetwise and gall to expose the dirt within her own cherished catholicism about the child abuse going on. Like an ornate peacock, the Catholic church’s feathers that kept its high-seated priesthood protected and beyond reproach were being ruffled and plucked away by Sinead through the 90s, reverberating to this day. Like Joan of Arc a heroic French martyr, Sinead experienced a similar martyrdom in sacrificing her burgoining musical career for the sake of calling out culture. Sometimes she was right, other times wrong or just plain zany. She reminded me of some other female pop renegades like Sia, Bejork and Alanis Morresette who marched to their own eclectic drum.
God used her, no matter her mental instability she had throughout life. Life lesson: humans will fail you everyday—some more than others; only through our believing and receiving of God’s grace are we made whole again. Sinead makes for a fascinating study on human pyschology and the meloncholic romance that people have with fame.
7 ways Sinead’s dichotomy lifestyle made her a modern day renegade:
1) On the outside babyface yet impish look reflects the dichotomy of her mindset: she was a child of light and darkness. She had this intense fascination, awe, fear, wonder of God growing up Catholic.
2) Meanwhile, she lived in an abusive home brought on by her mentally unstable mother. O’Conner had a complicated love-hate relationship with her mother until her passing for which she wrote the famous song “Nothing Compares to You”. Sinead seems very forgiving and empathetic towards her mother even though she was what led Sinead to have trauma for the rest of her life. Sinead was later diagnosed with Bipolar disorder, a disease developed after 18, such as her case, coming from one’s formative years growing up in an abusive home.
“Child abuse is an identity crisis and fame is an identity crisis, so I went straight from one identity crisis into another.”
3) She shaved her head because she wanted to go against expected female norms but it ironically brought her more attention as this peculiar emo pop diva (at least to us Americans across the pond.). She also felt like her long hair sexualized her and she wanted to go a 180 from that, a coping mechanism to deal with the sexual and emotional hurt she suffered as a child. At one point she started growing it back out until people started mistaking her for the other Irish singer Enya.
4) “The Lion and the Chobra” was her first album and I believe that reflects the war inside her between light and dark forces. The lion personifies God or Jesus and the cobra/snake personifies the devil. That album was a harbinger to her life long struggle with these forces.
“When you live with the Devil you learn there's a God very quickly.”
5) Her tearing of the pope photo simultaneously destroyed her career and built it up. This was a modern Joan of Arc move. Meanwhile, the harlot Madonna trolled off her controversy and morphed the limelight on Sinead into her virtue signaling display when she tore up a photo of some guy that got with a teenager on long Island, saying that was the man too focus on. Madonna knows nothing except how to exploit others to feed her fame machine.
6) She became an ordained Catholic priest which was met with a lot of controversy and then converted a few years ago to Muslim
7) In 2014 he had her cheeks tatted with the initials “B” and ‘Q” of a then-boyfriend to visually remind her of the fight. That lasted under year and she got them lazered off.
“Ok, it's time to get this stupid sh*t off my face.”
