''Clear, strong, prayerful work, with joy at its centre.''
Art critic Sister Wendy Beckett
“…a visionary painter…”
Meryl Doney, Curator for Wallspace All Hallows on the Wall
“Brian Whelan’s bold, large scale paintings have immense physical
presence. They’re loaded with imagery and design, densely configured
into a rich pattern of considerable complexity.”
Victoria Donohoe, art critic, Philadelphia Inquirer
“Whelan’s art rescues the rich treasury of Catholic iconography from the fog of syncretist, solipsistic thinking.”
Martin Boland, Dean of Brentwood Cathedral
“He goes to dark, grim places, places that in the modern world we like to pretend don’t exist and when he gets there he cracks jokes. This work is the work of the medieval jester.”
Joe Horgan, Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award winner
“His work is bold and commanding.”
Seamus Heaney, Nobel Prize for literature
“Looking at a Whelan painting is like looking at a stained glass window, through the eyes of Bart Simpson.”
Writer and critic Steven Martin
“The best way I could describe Brian would be to call him the rock & roll painter.”
Paul McGuinness of the Popes
“It’s as if a medieval stone mason had been given a box of paints.”
Brother Vaughan, Society of St. Francis
“Brian’s cityscapes have frantic energy.”
‘Amelia’, Melbourne’s Street Poet