Work in Progress - February 2020

I’ve been working away on the new paintings for Westport, I’m fairly happy with them but a couple will need a glaze or a couple of highlights scumbled in later. That’s it as far as the studio goes really, just painting away.

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In Heritage House the Cork & Canvas nights are going well, we’re going into the fifth night of them this week and we’ve started running workshops in painting for senior citizens, after school workshops for children aged 7 to 12 and starting this week there will be workshops for teens. I think they will all run for about 6 weeks. They’ll run along side the school terms so I think we’re going to try another batch of 6 week blocks until the summer.

Heritage House Cork & Canvas

We’re going to be running art sessions at Heritage House called Cork & Canvas, starting this Thursday, February 13th. We’ll supply the materials and anyone who wants to call in can bring their own drink. We didn’t want to run workshops and put people under pressure to feel that what they’re doing is right or wrong and with it being held in the evening we just wanted it to be a bit of a social gathering for everyone to relax and have fun while drawing, painting or whatever medium they want to work with.

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The poster above was designed by Mairéad Connell and has all the information on it. The sessions will run for 12 weeks so if people want to just call in whenever they get the chance they can without being afraid of missing a week. If anyone’s around Abbeyleix or the local area call in, there’s no need to book, some people have asked if they could just just call in for a chat

Work in Progress November, December 2019 & January 2020

I haven’t posted since November because with the Christmas break December was going to be a bit all over the place and with January being a bit of a slow month I decided I’d just try to sum up the 3 months in one post. After stepping back from the large painting that was in some of the previous posts, I started work on some new pieces for Westport and I have 3 finished for a bit, I have to go back with a bit of a glaze on one of them to adjust the colour one of the Sluagh masks needs an couple of highlights and the other need s a couple of glazes then they’ll be ready for the exhibition. I’m going at some new frames this weekend and a bit of drawing towards what is now going to be a diptych and another piece hopefully.

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I’ve been trying to paint with a little more urgency and slightly looser than I was for the last year or so because I was getting so caught up in tiny details that some of the paintings were verging on overworked. When I was on the MFA, Kevin Atherton who was the Head of the Masters programme in NCAD said about one of the paintings in my studio that I was showing my knowledge of painting, that the viewer would be able to construct the painting from what detail I had on the canvas so I want to try and get back to that while continuing with the same style of painting. It wasn’t that I was afraid of having too little detail in the painting that it wouldn’t be clear what it was but it takes very, very little for me to start worrying that I can’t paint so I think I was trying to tell myself otherwise.

I’m also planning to go with a mixture of paintings and props for this next show in Westport. I’ve given up trying to make the antlers from scratch, they keep breaking under their own weight and I’m not scaling them down so I decided instead to use branches, as a headpiece it’s not put together yet but I think I’m going to be happier with how they looks because they’re slightly different lengths and they’re fairly crooked and gnarled. This rougher appearance makes it look like the character they’re for crawled out of the Earth. I’m going to remake the shamrock for the Leprechaun too, I think I’m going to try that Worbla material for it. I want to make some wall mounts for them this time instead of the free standing plinths that I made for Birr so I’ll have 3 of them and I think I’m going to try and hang the leprechaun hoodie with a few pins.

Work in Progress - July 2019

This month consisted of workshops and, at long last, some painting. The workshops were running every Tuesday for the month of July at The Dunamaise Art Centre and for 2 hours each night. Originally I was going to set up a still life to work from but it couldn’t be left set up from one week to the next so I got the group to work from photographs. Two of these images were what I made works from last year and the third was one that I never used. Everyone’s paintings turned out really well and for most it was their first time using oils so I had them working with a fairly limited palette, using 5 colours and ran over some mediums, canvas preparations and a couple of other bits . Following off the back of those workshops, I’m looking into sorting out a follow up session that will hopefully run for a little longer. I have some images of the group’s work below, I didn’t go mad snapping pictures because I didn’t want to be annoying them or stopping them working so I just got a few snaps before the start of the workshops on week two and week four. When the follow up goes ahead it will be at Heritage House in Abbeyleix

Back in the studio I finally started painting this piece that I have been doing research for and sketching since April and it got off to a rocky start. When I start a painting, I draw it out on paper, sort out anything that I want to sort, trace the drawing and then transfer it over onto canvas. This process was a necessity in this case because I want to keep the canvas clean so it was a way of keeping pencil lines where I want them. The problems started when I tried to transfer the drawing, the first time, I’m not sure why, maybe the pencil wasn’t soft enough, but it didn’t press onto the canvas. Sickened, I traced it again using a softer pencil, this time the trace moved and one section ended up where it was meant to be, then continued on an inch higher than it should have been, I was annoyed and thought will I just turn this into a glitch painting. I stretched the canvas a third time in not so great lighting, I transferred the drawing , it went on perfect and I was happy, until I turned on the light and saw that there was a wrinkle running the width of the canvas that priming didn’t get rid of, so that was ripped off the frame again. I ironed the canvas twice, I stretched it a fourth time, I traced the drawing with a 5B pencil fairly heavily, I stuck the trace with the strongest tape I had and finally got a result and now I have the painting underway and I’m about two and a half weeks into it.

I’m happy with how the painting is going, I think I’ll be working this way for the next body of work too. I struggle to finish paintings, I think maybe because when they’re done there’s a feeling of separation or something whereas with this way of working it’s open to the possibility of adding to it until it goes to exhibition at least.

Work in Progress - June 2019

I spent June finishing off the sketch to a point where I’d be happy to put it on canvas, there’s a few more bits that I want to put in but I want to start getting paint on canvas so I’ll add the extras later. I’m running a little later than I was expecting with the painting because I ran into a few problems with the painting last week and had to re-stretch the canvas twice so I’m hoping it’ll go smoothly this time, the first problem was with the preparation itself, the next time I ran into trouble transferring the drawing onto the canvas. I was back in Photoshop preparing a couple of other images to add at a later stage too.

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I ordered the frame from the Milliken Brothers in County Down, their frames are really well made and sturdy and with this being a much larger painting than what I have been working on lately and also due to the shape of the canvas I wanted to take precautions to avoid any potential warping further down the line.

I ran the workshops at Heritage House for Cruinniú na nÓg (images below) and the 4 day painting workshop too and they went well. The Cruinniú na nÓg was just a case of people participating as they called in and there was a steady crowd. The 4 day workshops were a little slow to fill up but ended up close to full in the last few days before they started. I planned out a lot more than we could’ve fitted into each day just to make sure that we weren’t going to be left with a window of having nothing to be at.

June felt fairly busy but I think I was just focusing on two or three things fairly intensely and trying to aim for a few deadline set by myself and workshop dates and then there were a few problems I had foreseen with the canvas.

First day of the 4 day workshops when the group did colour theory