In addition to his work as an artist, Quinn was a member of the 1980s new wave musical groups the Teardrop Explodes, the Wild Swans and the Lotus Eaters, and co-wrote the latter band's 1983 hit single "The First Picture of You".
For example, his "Cross in the Wilderness" introduces a miniature Spandau Prison, the iconic jail for Nazi war criminals, into a forest scene based on "Der Chasseur im Walde" by Friedrich, a leading painter in German Romanticism.
Despite the familiar aspects in Ged Quinn’s use of painting techniques—ranging from the classical and Romantic traditions of European landscape, such as Caspar David Friedrich, to the American Sublime—his introduction of incongruent and often disturbing imagery, disruptions of scale, and an undercurrent of religious sensibility and political and cultural iconography creates a sense of haunting and dislocation.
In Quinn’s work, the landscapes themselves have a visionary character, providing an unfolding freedom that is a boundless showground for significance.
[3] There is an energy that moves throughout his works, which is in part driven by Quinn’s surreal and radical methods of composition and use of imagery.