Show in Wesport, Co. Mayo

I haven’t posted in a long while, mostly because with lockdowns there hadn’t been much happening and now I a week late with this one, but I have a solo show at Custom House Studios in Westport that opened to the public on June 3rd. That runs until June 27th and is titled From Under the Hill, there was no open event due to the restrictions so the gallery installed the work and opened it’s doors. I was delighted to hear back from Custom House Studios, it’s a place I love showing and it was nice to kick things off fairly quickly after the easing of lockdown.

During the lockdown I started The Bit of Gallery Podcast, on the show I chatted with artists either with rural backgrounds or artists who are based in rural Ireland, it ran for 12 episodes and came to a bit of a halt because with the lockdown lifting there were a few things coming up that meant I just hadn’t time to juggle them all, including the show in Westport, Crinniú na nÓg, going back to my part time job and also getting accepted onto the Azure Dementia Inclusive Training. I’m hoping to get it back up and going in the next few weeks.

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.

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 - April 2019

I spent most of April working in Photoshop trying to make one image, that I will paint from, out of several pieces of photography. I wanted to have the Púca and parts of the Lafcadio Hearn Gardens combined on canvas so I was cutting bits and pieces away and adding the figure below. I got the figure cut out and added fairly quickly, it was just a case of getting direction of the light matching the the light in the garden photos.

There were a few bits that had to be flipped to make the light and shadow make sense but that wasn’t to much of a problem because the pictures weren’t meant to be of that specific garden. What took the most time on Photoshop was editing out the background in a photo of an olive tree, it had more plants behind it and it made it hard to know what was olive tree and what was background.

I eventually got most of it done and started sketching it out on paper. There’s a few more additions to make but I’ll get them in gradually, I have a fair bit to do on the sketch still before it’s put on canvas but I hope to be painting it before the end of next month.

The piece is going to be 108cm x 54cm so it’s the biggest painting I’ve worked on in a long while.