STATEMENT OF WORK

I started pursuing art seriously in 2015. Having previously only done portraiture since leaving school, I began doing digital paintings, monotypes and cartoonish, figurative charcoal drawings. My focus was on bad art, parody art, what I now call “fake art”/ work that wasn’t always what it seemed. I made digital paintings made to look like real paintings and the occasional painting, print and drawing made to look like digital art, placed over light boxes. I would often digitally manipulate images just to post on Instagram as a response to Instagram “culture”. Andy Warhol was a huge inspiration. I produced hundreds of digital variations of the same image. Repetition was key. I started looking for exhibiting opportunities and painting full time in 2018.
 

My current work demonstrates versatility although its main focus is landscape-inspired abstract paintings. Initially I sought to reduce my memories and perceptions of landscape down to simple shapes, marks and “shadows” using a limited colour palette. I believed, like Hofmann, that “the ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak”. However, my recent paintings are becoming more complex and are evolving into emotional landscapes. Each work is a response to a different landscape and/or emotional state. The work’s reflection of the environment, its connection to ecology, is of urgent importance to me.
My mind tends to race in a million different directions and I am always planning my next few series although I still like to dip in and out of past projects depending on my mood. Nothing is ever really finished. It should be noted that, while I generally work in a series, experimentation is a key part of my practice and I produce many paintings which are not directly linked to any of the other works although they still retain a recognisable style. My work is mainly informed by American and Australian abstract expressionism, the School of London but more recently also by Irish Modernism, Per Kirkeby and Chinese artists such as Tu Hungtao and Zao Wou-Ki.

FIGURATIVE ART

I have recently returned to figurative art. I am currently working on a series of paintings inspired by the literary works of Samuel Beckett and Ernest Hemingway. In the Samuel Beckett series (there are five paintings so far in this series), I depict characters from his works while using space to convey existence and attempt equally, through the use of movement (brush work, impasto or water), to convey life as a force. Two of these were painted on the back of other paintings, using the reverse structure of the canvas as a window (the emphasis of us peering into these scenes and characters), to set a “stage” and as a symbol of entrapment/entombment (every painting or photograph could be a sort of entombment).. .In one of these, the painting “Play”, rather than depicting grey heads in grey urns, I depict three faces on different levels in colour framed in red and have also chosen to depict two of the characters as male while the other is androgynous. It is unclear whether it is male or female and that is simply up to viewer to decide. I also chose to paint a singular hand pressing against the “glass” of the scene, symbolising touch and human connection or escape. Whose hand is it?
In the second of these reverse paintings, “Happy Days”, I use a similar technique. I depict “Winnie” here wearing her lipstick (daily routine and in reference to these lines : "is it a kiss you’re after, Willie … or is it something else?”; “[pouts] … a hint of lip … [pouts again] … if I pout them out” ) and looking outwards on the right of the canvas to reinforce her isolation. The other character is not hidden but behind her (memories perhaps), out of her sight. I depict Willie here in a way that is a deliberate reference to Francis Bacon’s work, a reference to that sort of masculinity (I was always struck by the hog “conversation”). I have introduced a third face, in fact, meant to be a younger Willie. I chose a second Willie to symbolise repetition and the relationship between the past and the present. Her memories and search of him. I am not a scholar and have never studied Beckett so no doubt this will all make academics shriek!
There are two “Waiting for Godot” paintings. In the second larger one (100 x 140 cm), I deliberately refer to Louis Le Brocquy’s 1951 painting, “A Family,” hoping to draw a connection between the psychological anxiety of Beckett’s work and Le Brocquy’s painting. This is purely because every time I am in Dublin, I go to see that painting and I always think “Waiting for Godot” when I look at it, perhaps a feeling of a “private nightmare.” I chose to paint this over an older painting, creating layers/eroding memories.
In all the Samuel Beckett paintings, I have chosen to depict heads and incomplete figures. I saw them first as abstract characters in an abstract world but I also hope that this imparts a feeling of helplessness and an existential struggle.
 

I am also working on a series of green oil bar and digital portraits. All unnamed. These are portraits of people I have seen out and about, on trains and buses etc . As well as historical figures and sometimes celebrities.