Friday, September 24, 2010
Thursday, April 15, 2010
Persephone Exhibition, The Bad Art Gallery, Dublin. April, 2010.
In this exhibition Persephone, I have found my source of inspiration from Greek mythology. It is the story of Persephone’s abduction from her mother Demeter, the earth goddess, by Hades, king of the underworld. Demeter in her grief forbids the earth to produce, and in the depths of her despair causes nothing to grow. When Demeter and her daughter are finally united, the earth flourishes with renewed vegetation and colour. But before Persephone is released Hades tricks her into eating four pomegranate seeds, which forces her to return to the underworld as his queen for a season each year, when once again the earth becomes a barren realm. This is an origin story to explain the seasons.
Something about this ancient story intrigued and inspired me and I have interpreted it in my own way, picking out the visual and playful elements. I have tried to impart a seductive, wintry quality to my still lives and interiors, using warm siennas and umbers and thick white, creams and neutral layers of impasto oil paint applied with a palette knife. In some of my figurative paintings, I am trying to evoke that dilemma of being physically in one place but mentally in another. In this case, being locked in the cosy depths of winter, where the evenings draw in early and life becomes internalised, yet dreaming and yearning for the summer, where time is stretched out in seemingly endless hours of daylight.
In this exhibition I have attempted to expand my painting language further by incorporating the male form into my compositions for the first time. However, for me the subject matter is the starting point to a painting, not the end. So I try to give the figure, whether male or female, the same treatment as I would a vase of flowers. I want the figure to just exist and sit right in the painting, and not to story tell and distract. My overall objective is to produce well balanced paintings, where the beautiful properties of the colour and the texture of paint predominates the picture plane. I see my job as a facilitator to this end and by using sympathetic subject matter and by using the compositional elements and devices that I have built up and developed over the years, I attempt to reach the paint’s maximum potential. Link
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Thinking of Summer 71 x 61 cm Oil on canvas |
In this exhibition Persephone, I have found my source of inspiration from Greek mythology. It is the story of Persephone’s abduction from her mother Demeter, the earth goddess, by Hades, king of the underworld. Demeter in her grief forbids the earth to produce, and in the depths of her despair causes nothing to grow. When Demeter and her daughter are finally united, the earth flourishes with renewed vegetation and colour. But before Persephone is released Hades tricks her into eating four pomegranate seeds, which forces her to return to the underworld as his queen for a season each year, when once again the earth becomes a barren realm. This is an origin story to explain the seasons.
Something about this ancient story intrigued and inspired me and I have interpreted it in my own way, picking out the visual and playful elements. I have tried to impart a seductive, wintry quality to my still lives and interiors, using warm siennas and umbers and thick white, creams and neutral layers of impasto oil paint applied with a palette knife. In some of my figurative paintings, I am trying to evoke that dilemma of being physically in one place but mentally in another. In this case, being locked in the cosy depths of winter, where the evenings draw in early and life becomes internalised, yet dreaming and yearning for the summer, where time is stretched out in seemingly endless hours of daylight.
In this exhibition I have attempted to expand my painting language further by incorporating the male form into my compositions for the first time. However, for me the subject matter is the starting point to a painting, not the end. So I try to give the figure, whether male or female, the same treatment as I would a vase of flowers. I want the figure to just exist and sit right in the painting, and not to story tell and distract. My overall objective is to produce well balanced paintings, where the beautiful properties of the colour and the texture of paint predominates the picture plane. I see my job as a facilitator to this end and by using sympathetic subject matter and by using the compositional elements and devices that I have built up and developed over the years, I attempt to reach the paint’s maximum potential. Link
Thursday, April 1, 2010
Monday, July 20, 2009
Pastoral Exhibition. The Bad Art Gallery, Dublin. July, 2009
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Blue still life 71 x 71 cm Oil on canvas |
Since the middle of 2008, I have been painting for my new show Pastoral. For me a theme to an exhibition, is an overall guideline, as I like to skirt around a subject not adhering to it exactly but using it more like an anchor that I can refer back to as a source of inspiration. Sometimes the title I chose for an exhibition if at all is a word that looks visually right with the group of paintings, no more than to evoke a mood rather than a literal summing up. After all to understand and ‘read’ paintings is a unique visual sensory experience, which is such a different mental process from reading or interpreting a written text, therefore I am very wary of too much explanation when it comes to my paintings. However a certain amount of words could be useful to throw light on how to read or get to know my work, but I feel too many words can distract and create barriers. I know why I created a painting, I know all its symbolism and historical and personal references, but that’s essentially about the process of painting not the painting itself. The process is whatever it takes to come up with the end product, which is then released, from my grasp and control. Whatever the viewer cares to see or interpret in my paintings is the paintings start of a new existence separate from me, it now belongs to whoever is looking at it, it is unique for them alone and hopefully the painting has enough visual information and painterly language for it to be understandable. That is what I have always understood to be what ‘living art’ means. A painting that stands up on it’s own by living through the person who is considering and looking at it, at the time.
So this collection of paintings called Pastoral is far from a documentation of my life in the countryside, but a starting point of a theme. I have intentionally set out to depict the idyll of country living and have selected scenes from my immediate surroundings of rural County Wicklow
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