Men of the South: A virtual reality take on iconic War of Independence painting

David Keating - grandson of original artist Seán Keating - is one of the people involved in Sit Stand Smoke, a VR project that explores the iconic painting at Crawford Art Gallery in Cork

Sun, 05 May, 2024 - 10:11

Marc O’Sullivan Vallig

Seán Keating’s Men of the South is one of the most iconic paintings of the Irish War of Independence. It depicts a group of six fighters from the 2nd North Cork Brigade of the IRA – Jim Riordan, Denis O’Mullane, Jim Cashman, John Jones, Roger Kiely and Dan Browne – all armed and shown in profile, as if preparing for battle. It was acquired for the Crawford Art Gallery in April 1924.

One hundred years later, the artist’s grandson David Keating and his collaborator Linda Curtin present Sit Stand Smoke, a Virtual Reality exploration of the painting, in the same room in the Crawford as it hangs in today. The experience requires the viewer to don a Virtual Reality headset and remain seated in a chair while an 18-minute 3-D drama appears to unfold all around them. More than 100 technicians and actors were involved in its making.

Sit Stand Smoke’s creators share an interest in telling stories through new technologies. Curtin runs a company called Immersive Ireland, training people in VR production, while Keating helped write the screenplay for Jim Sheridan’s film, Into the West, and has also directed two feature films, The Last of the High Kings and Wake Wood. He currently lectures at the National Film School in Dublin.

“We’ve been exploring advances in screen production for the last number of years,” says Curtin. “We go to a lot of VR festivals, and we're very interested in how screen production is moving into a kind of spatial storytelling. We had a period of about a year where we were developing the script, playing, testing and prototyping for this project. It's been challenging, but it’s also been kind of magical.”

Co-directors of Sit Stand Smoke, David Keating (centre) and Linda Curtin (right) with camera op Leonardo Soggiu. Picture: Tadhg Richardson

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This is not the first time Keating has engaged with his grandfather’s legacy; in 1996, he collaborated with his father, the late Labour Party politician and journalist Justin Keating, to produce the documentary film, Seán Keating: The Pilgrim Soul. Nor is he the only family member involved in Sit Stand Smoke; the production features his nephew, the actor Jonathan Quinlan, playing Keating in an encounter with the contemporary arts writer Dr Eimear O’Connor.

O’Connor is Seán Keating’s biographer, and a passionate champion of his work. “It was very important for us to bring Eimear into this piece,” says Curtin. “There's a real sense of her personality shining through, which we're really quite chuffed about, because she's almost the centre point of the piece, and it brings the story to life in a kind of alternative way. The thing about using new technologies is that we could allow Eimear and Seán to have a conversation.”

David Keating remembers of his grandfather: “He was emphatic. And if you asked him anything, he never held back. He was very clear in his opinions. In my childhood, he was certainly the most intense person I'd ever met.” Seán Keating, who died in 1977, aged 88, had a reputation as a traditionalist, a Royal Hibernian Academy stalwart who did not welcome advances in contemporary art. But O’Connor has done much to challenge that image in her writings, and David Keating maintains that his grandfather was “quite avant garde, in some ways. Eimear insists he would have loved virtual reality. He'd have got himself a headset, she says.

“To some degree, that notion comes from the way he used a camera. He loved engineering. He adored the time he spent with the ESB documenting the construction of the power station at Ardnacrusha in the 1920s. And he used a Bell and Howell 16mm film camera in a very particular way, almost like a stills camera. He had an epidiascope, or projector, that allowed him to look at the frames individually. He worked from photographs he’d taken of the IRA men when he painted Men of the South in January 1922, and he continued on using his camera right through the 1930s and ’40s and ’50s.”

On set for the filming of the Men of the South project, Sit Stand Smoke. Picture: Tadhg Richardson

The encounter between O’Connor and the artist is arguably the key scene in Sit Stand Smoke. “I find it very moving,” says Curtin. “Eimear gets to question Seán about what he was thinking when he made the painting, and his response to politics since that time.” As David Keating sees it, Men of the South is an expression of “Seán identifying an important moment in time and people who to him were heroes because they were committed to their ideals and what they wanted, an independent Irish state, a new country for us all. To me it's a celebration of people who were committed to an ideal, a sort of dream of independence.”

As for what his grandfather made of the new Ireland that emerged in the 1920s, Keating says: “I'm not sure I can safely speak for him, but my impression of what he felt was that we weren't as independent as we could have been and should have been. I think he was somewhat disappointed. The struggle for independence tumbled into a civil war which he was disgusted by. He became vociferously anti-violence.

“I think to some degree he felt that we still had a colonial mind. He wrote an article called The Slave Mind of Ireland where he basically said; own your country, own your life.”

Keating explains that the first two words of the title Sit Stand Smoke refer to the positioning of the IRA men in Men of the South; most are seated, while a few are on their feet. The third word refers to “the smoke of war, perhaps,” he says. “But it’s also suggesting that there are these ghosts that are with us still. A hundred years on, they're still relevant.”