Painting stolen

Still life with Olive Oil  oil on canvas  61x71cm

Just posting up an image of this painting that was recently stolen from a Foxrock Gallery Co. Dublin.  

any info much appreciated. 

Rose Red and Snow White donated to Crumlin's Childrens Hospital

I have put up this video that helps explain the thinking behind my recent painting Rose Red and Snow White.  I am in the process of donating the painting to Crumlin's Childrens Hospital.  Thank you to Becky from Sparrow and Gray who put the video together for me.

Scheherazade 2013

snow white and rose red  oil on canvas 72x96inches

                                           

I am currently working on a series of paintings for a solo show in November of this year.  I usually theme my work loosely around a title.  This helps me set the scene and mood for a series of connected work that hopefully will reinforce my ideology and theory behind  painting.  It sounds all very premeditated and grown up but it feels very far from that for me.  I find the whole business of creating paintings illogical and chaotic, its like trying to put loose feathers into a pillowcase; you know what you want to achieve and you know what you have, to achieve it: but the actual doing of it seems at first an impossible task, but as the work progresses, you get inspired by getting through each hurdle and the comforting knowledge that you have achieved it before and so the confidence builds as the work emerges and starts to feed back clues and information on how to proceed to the finish.  So for me building work around a theme is one way of controlling the endless possibilities and keeping the work on some sort of intellectual track.

For this upcoming show I am using the working title Scheherazade.  In itself, it is a great looking word, even though I can’t pronounce it!!  Of course it is the Arabian tale of the princess  Scheherazade who has to make up an elaborate and absorbing story for the King, who having been cuckolded by a previous wife, has lost his confidence in relationships and so like every story-book King must do, having spent one night with his new bride, has them executed.  Scheherazade however is a realist and has an imagination, and so imbarks on her 1001 nights of Arabian tales, and so seals her fate of living a long and married life. 

I have always felt a deep connection to the old fairy tales of my childhood in the  Grimm's and Anderson's gruesome stories of dysfunctional families set in deep dark forests.

I started work on this show last summer, with a huge 6 foot by 8 foot canvas, the largest I have worked on to date.  The subject was Snow white and Rose Red, two sisters who live with their mother in a cosy cottage at the edge of a forest, and where one stormy night they hear a knock on the door and open it to a huge grisly bear faint with fatigue and hunger.  They of course, after their initial surprise and horror, take him into to the bosom of their home and later when he turns back into the handsome prince that he always was, he marries one of the sisters.

flowers and butterflies 36x30 inches 

The colours in this painting are very like some of the work in the Walled Garden collection as there was a lot of follow through.

 However in Scheherazade  I am trying to introduce a warmer palette of stronger reds and yellows and the rest of the exhibition reflects this, as can be seen with' Fishermans Still life'. 

Fisherman's Still life  92x102cm

I decided to compositionally divide' Rose Red and Snow White'  down the middle and use this line of symmetry to balance each side out by creating cross links between the two halves of the painting with diagonal lines and colour- echoing.  Each side  works as an independent painting so as to enable the viewer to take in the imagery in a more accommodating scale.  The face of the bear in the centre of the painting is sort of unsettling and weird but its what I wanted to achieve, a slight threat to the domestic scene inside, however to subdue the intense impact of his voyeurism I painted him in monochromes  very near to the ground colour.

My other paintings in this collection have explored other fairy tales such as Cinderella, the Fisherman and his wife and the Little Mermaid, but as always with my subject matter the literal story telling is definately second place to  the colour, design and composition of my work, which is where my heart lies.

Hall table mirror 71x71cm oil on canvas

Here is a video Rebecca from www.sparrowandgray.com made for me earlier on this year, about the idea and concept behind this painting.  This painting is available at the Doorway Gallery www.thedoorwaygallery.com.

Pauline Bewick at the Taylor Gallery

I went to see Pauline Bewick’s major solo exhibition at the Taylor Gallery in Dublin yesterday.  We all know Bewicks instantly recognizable figurative narratives, executed in her very individual fluid graphic style. But I think this time I began to realize how unique she really is, she has such a wonderfully uninhibited and wacky way of visually expressing herself.  Her style is utterly eccentric yet beautifully lyrical.  Bewick is a brave artist who is doing her own thing and tells her story from her heart.   She is to me, a lone voice of authenticity and such a breath of fresh air.  And then she goes and takes that breath away with her Fox and Nesting Goose.  It reads as mixed media in the catalogue, but Bewick has taken the story telling to its literal conclusion and stuck on goose feathers and grasses onto the paper alongside its painted image!!  I went away from her exhibition, feeling light headed and extremely giddy.  This is a woman that has pushed her boundaries to the limit and she has inspired me greatly to carry on with what I am doing, and has encouraged me as a painter to be as brave as I dare.

This wonderful exhibition goes on until the 29^th September at The Taylor Gallery,  16 Kildare Street, Dublin 2. www.taylorgalleries.ie

Ballymaloe and Camille Souter

Ballymaloe's Dining Room

I don’t want to sound all smug and conceited here, but recently I was whisked off to the utterly delectable  Ballymaloe Country House Hotel run by the Allen family, for what I feel was a much deserved and long-awaited break.  Yes and Ballymaloe is just ‘right’ in every way, it certainly ticks all my boxes and the food is just ‘simply delicious’. Long live the Allen dynasty.

What I didn’t prepare for though was the sheer delight of seeing so much modern Irish art on the walls, from the exquisite Louis LeBrocquy tapestries hanging in the entrance hall; the hard- edge abstracts of Cecil King and Patrick Scott, to the Michael Farrell’s self-searching prints decking the corridors.  Iconic names such as Nano Reid, Norah McGuiness, Jack Yeats, Mary Swanzy, adorn every alcove, nook and cranny.  This is a personal collection of great insight and empathy with that period of Irish Art history that starts with Nathanial Hone’s  pastoral scenes and ends with Elizabeth Cope’s eye popping red field with sheep.   This is such a strong and obviously much loved and cherished family collection and as a result a very cohesive and concise slice of important Irish art.

If I was to choose a favourite painting from this collection, it would be the understated Camille Souter that is hanging in the sitting room.   This painting is hung between the two large sash windows, a little ‘tongue in cheek’ I feel, as the painting itself depicts a large sash window filling the whole canvas, framing a view of a garden.   Like all Souter’s work it is tonally complex and subtly sophisticated.  I like to feel that she painted this while staying as a guest at Ballymaloe, all molly-coddled and sated, lying in white linen sheets with her hall-mark of a beret firmly placed on the side of her head, and the breakfast  tray with the remnants of a lightly poached egg , jugged kipper, and half- drunk third cup of tea, at her bare feet.   I imagine  her easel is set up conveniently  next to her bedside table and the sprigged floral sanderson curtains are drawn well back to reveal a soft grey-green sort of day, a heavy drizzle has set in, stopping Camille from flinging open the French doors.  She is putting the finishing touches to her Ballymaloe painting, that will be presented to the art loving member of the Allen family later on that day, and yes it is a  view from her bed –and why not, a sash window creates the perfect  framework in which  to suspend her tender brush strokes of abstracted form and delicate colour nuances, in a masterpiece of painterly perfection. 

Camille Souter  Washing by the Canal.

'Walled Garden' summer paintings 2012

cream tea 122x122cm oil on canvas

Walled garden summer collection now available and showing at The Doorway Gallery, Dublin  2 and The Russell Gallery , Putney, London.

It was during the Christmas break that I first conceived of the idea for this painting.  My two daughters back for the holiday and bonding over the kitchen table probably with laptops and coffee between them, where at either side of my long refectory-type table, and I was at the kitchen sink (no comment) looking across directly mid line.  I felt a painting coming on, and jotted down a few quick reminders to work through the idea more fully later.  I have used cream tea as subject matter before, back in 2005, where there were two cream tea still lifes in my solo show at Adam’s in St.Stephan’s Green, Dublin 2.  My aim, in this recent collection of summer paintings, was to make my interior scenes have an outdoor country feel, maybe some deep physiological need for summer during the short dark days of winter……. Crazy really ‘cos we still hav’nt had any decent summer weather yet and its July in a few days!  So I am thinking that in my case my paintings are definately a form of self-medication!

I suppose, in this painting more than in the rest of the ‘Walled Garden” collection, I have used a lot of different fabrics, and it is in these textiles that I have introduced most of the outdoor references.  These have been sourced mainly from 18th century textiles and decorative patterns.  If we think nowadays that we are innovative and edgy with our decorative arts, then think again as 300 years ago, it was as punky and wacky as it gets.  I think all our colour do’s and don’t’s must have happened relatively recently. I have never liked being told what not to do, so I have pheasants, butterflies, flowers and strawberry plants all vying for attention.  Even though I use colour defiantly and boldly go where no man has gone before,  I see them as all balanced and harmonious and to me impart a sense of calmness and well-being. 

18th century fabric book