Seen a painting of a Dart train in Dublin? It was probably by John O’Flynn.

The mural appeared on a wooden hoarding behind the graving docks in the Grand Canal Basin last month.

It captured a scene familiar to many locals in the area: a Dart train trundling along the tracks parallel to the coast.

The sky over the green and yellow carriages was a pink evening glow. The train, an impressionistic haze – and in the distance, beyond trees, was the familiar sight of St Michael’s spire in Dún Laoghaire.

Below the piece, the artist John O’Flynn had jotted that this was a scene from out in Blackrock.

Until last week, it was one of two murals that the artist had created over the summer in the city which showed the train service as it journeyed up and down the county.

The other, O’Flynn had spray-painted onto the boarded windows of the old Bernard Shaw pub on South Richmond Street in June.

That one depicted the train as it travelled between Monkstown and Dún Laoghaire on a bright blue sunny day. But by Thursday evening, it had been erased. 

The whole protected facade of the otherwise demolished pub had been doused in black paint.

O’Flynn had himself seen his work getting brushed away as he rode the bus from his home in Rathmines to his studio across the city in Whitehall, he said recently.

“I saw them scraping off the paint and all,” he said, as he walked down a grassy backlane towards his workspace.

He unbolted the steel doors. And right inside his quiet studio, almost immediately, was another spray-painted rendering of a Dart on canvas about five feet tall and wide.

This Dart was passing under the glassy pedestrian bridge in Dún Laoghaire station.

Each scene is picturesque but what particularly attracts him is the underlying conflict, he says. “You have an industry-versus-nature feel to it.”

It’s a coastal track with a beautiful seafront, he says. “There’s the juxtaposition with this machinery. It’s a reflection on this interruption of nature and to what degree this is justified.”

There’s an element of nostalgia to each of the scenes too, he says. “But as well, it’s just a really nice train.”

“It’s a really nicely designed train,” he said, laughing.

Any surface can be a canvas

As O’Flynn set foot in his studio, he was just a week out from his second solo exhibition Souvenirs, which launches in Flux Studios on Thursday 24 September.

His space in this small garage off Collins Avenue was tidily arranged.

He had a small workplace with a jigsaw for building canvases. Nearby, shelves were stacked with dozens upon dozens of spray-paint cans, lying on their sides, the air filled with their chemical scent.

It’s easier having a studio out in Whitehall rather than a shared one in the city centre, he says. “I’d be a nightmare for anyone, just because of the spray paint. So I have the run of the place here.”

Graffiti was O’Flynn’s entry point into art. He took it up growing up in Galway, he says. “I was a teenager, from about the age of 14 I got really interested in that.”

Later, he moved up to Dublin to attend the National College of Art and Design. He studied industrial and product design, he says. “You can think about it as doing architecture for smaller, handheld things.”

It helped him hone his skills in three-dimensional drawing, he says. “Also a lot of the time you are designing consumer electronics.”

Resting on a shelf next to the doorway into the studio were some such items, like a toaster and an old black stereo system. But they didn’t appear to be present because O’Flynn energised himself with slices of toast. More likely, they were there because he intended them as canvases-of sorts.

It’s the idea at the heart of Souvenirs, he says. “Something I’ve been exploring over 2025 was integrating consumer electronics into my painting practice.”

Like with the walls he would spray-paint, the notion of using them as canvases sprang from a simple thought, he says. “I could paint on them.”

He stood up, and walked to a corner of the room cordoned off by large sheets of plastic hanging from the roof, and pulled out a microwave. Its glass door had been covered by an impressionistic still of a harbour.

“It breaks the functionality of the product,” he says. “You can’t see into it.”

Then, he lifted up a television screen showing a painted still of a Dart, and an old DVD player, its top serving as a canvas for a portrait of the Grand Canal in Venice.

The limits of working on such surfaces gives a different perspective on painting, he says. “You have this thing that you really recognise, and you have to integrate the work into the microwave, and it gives the paintings a new anchor point.”

It’s not really something people know him for, he says while holding up the DVD player. “I’m known for the Dart stuff. So I’m looking forward to seeing people's reactions.”

Somewhere that a painting shouldn’t be

After college, O’Flynn became interested in impressionistic artists, he says. “I started with watercolours on paper.”

Spray-paint was always a more durable and flexible medium, he says. “And for murals, I decided I wanted to take what I learned from that and do murals.”

His original murals differed from the landscapes that he tends to paint now, and which put on display the influence impressionism had on him. “They were more faces, animated faces,” he says.

The first landscapes he did were black and white, he says. “Like sketches. But with spray paint, and it was trying to bring what I did on paper with watercolours onto a larger scale and with my graffiti background.”

Besides murals on trains, he was commissioned by the Ringsend District and Historical Society to decorate planters around South Lotts Road with almost dreamy, smoky images of the area’s industrial heritage, like boats in the docks and the old gasworks building.

He referred back to photographs from the 1950s and 1960s, he says. “A lot of the references were picked for me, but I put my own spin on them.”

The fundamental thing that intrigues him, though, is creating images in unexpected places, he says. “Somewhere that a painting isn’t supposed to be.