BARBARA Hartigan from Castleconnell painted a large eight ft by six ft mural of this year’s Irish Eurovision entry Bambie Thug which will be exhibited at Electric Picnic this weekend.

Barbara previously created a mural for the festival about seven years ago and was approached again this year to create an artwork for the event’s 20th anniversary. She was inspired by Bambie’s performance at the International Eurovision competition. “A lot of my friends were dismissing it, they didn’t approve of it. I thought it was fantastic. It was totally different. It was imaginative.”

The Limerick woman painted Bambie Thug in a woodland, lit by moonlight. She said she made it “a little bit controversial” because Bambie is non-binary. “There’s this language that’s going around with the younger generation about using the word ‘they’ rather than the words ‘he’ and ‘she’, and I thought that using that language, it’s very hard for my generation to understand it and to use it,” she explained.

As a result, Barbara incorporated the question, “where is they?” into the piece as a conversation starter. “It was just to evoke a conversation really more than anything else,” she pointed out.

The talented artist remarked that she was prepared to take a chance with the artwork. “You tend to get even more conservative as you get older. You’re more cautious and I took caution to the wind and that was great.”

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She continued: “When you get to this age now, you say, ‘what the heck?!’ Open your mind and open your attitudes and give everything a fair chance to look at it and see.”

Barbara decided to add a depiction of the animated Disney character Bambi peeping out from behind a tree along with Bambie Thug. She also included ferns and foxgloves and the “sort of things that you find down in any woodland area, all in the foreground.

Barbara said Bambie does a distinctive dance move during the Eurovision performance which she depicted in the mural along with Bambie’s long fingernails. “It was a segment of my imagination sparked by the product.” She continued: “The only bit that I found difficult was the face and the leg.

“I didn’t know how to depict this dance movement… I thought anybody who watched the video would recognise that even if I didn’t manage to get the face right,” she said.

Barbara has appealed to a variety of age demographics by incorporating the visual of Disney’s Bambi for young children and Bambie Thug for teenagers and adults. “You could imagine smaller children identifying with that and saying, ‘Oh, look, that’s out of Walt Disney, the cartoon’.”

Barbara is very proud of the mural and the end result. “It was fun to do and very different to anything I’ve ever done before.
“I realised I was capable of doing it, I was capable of trying to get a feel for depicting something without being meticulously correct and conservative and that’s rather nice when you’re almost at your 79th year to turn around and be able to do something like that. “It’s very liberating,” commented Barbara.

She describes herself as a representational artist and she paints landscapes and portraits.