Charles Brady

Born and trained in New York and spent most of his life in Ireland. He fought in World War II and afterwards he did mundane jobs and took night classes in drawing. In 1948 he entered the Art Students League of New York and took a year long course. After art school he continued to paint, beginning to exhibit in the early 1950s and at the same time working to support himself, mostly in menial hotel jobs, but also for a while as guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 1959 he moved to Ireland and settled there for good, first in Dublin and then Dún Laoghaire. Poverty forced him to paint on small pieces of cardboard and small pictures became typical; he began to value the intimacy, and affordability, of small paintings.

In the 1960s he began painting still lives of every day objects such as envelopes and tickets and this also became typical. These small, modest, compositions allowed him to refine a spare almost mystical style.