• Oil on board 40cm x 40cm Ready to hang in slip frame
  • Oil on board 40cm x 40cm Ready to hang in slip frame
  • Oil on  canvas 100cm x 120cm Ready to hang in slip frame  
  • Oil on canvas 40cm x 40cm Ready to hang in slip frame
  • Oil on canvas 40cm x 40cm Ready to hang in slip frame
  • Oil on canvas 90cm x 60cm Ready to hang in slip frame
  • Oil on  board 30cm x 30cm Ready to hang in slip frame
  • 'In West Clare' (We are Eternal)

    In my life, I have only toured through Clare twice – once on a teaching assignment at the wonderful Burren School of Art, it was high Spring and wild flowers were a wonder as was the Nivea blue sea. We were blessed with great weather and lovely dips after class. My second visit was during a terrifically stormy season (July!). Puttering around the County Clare coastline after an absence of many years was restorative in all the right ways. We were awash with elements. Incessant rain kept us grounded – but even so, the beauty of the place was undeniable. Sometimes in places like that, on days like that - the ones that take your breath away – I wonder at how I might have missed it – been rained off etc and never known its colour, shapes and texture in that season. The storm added starkness to the landscape, giving more grist to the black of the Burren and a cobalt green to the tide turning on a cliff. And so much frothy white in the sea. I can recall the colours of both excursions with ease. The scenes are still in my senses, I think those moments – the magic ones – are like tattoos on our minds. Eternal in that moment, as are we. Oil On Canvas: 100cm x 80cm In Slip Frame Ready To Hang
  • Oil on canvas 40cm x 40cm Ready to hang in slip frame    
  • Oil on  board 30cm x 30cm Ready to hang in slip frame
  • Oil on canvas 40cm x 40cm Ready to hang in slip frame
  • Oil on canvas 40cm x 40cm Ready to hang in slip frame
  • Oil on  canvas 70cm x 50cm Ready to hang in slip frame
  • Oil on board 40cm x 40cm Ready to hang in slip frame
  • Oil on canvas 40cm x 40cm Ready to hang in slip frame
  • Oil on canvas 40cm x 40cm Ready to hang in slip frame
  • Oil on Board 35cm x 30cm In slip frame ready to hang
  • Oil on canvas 40cm x 40cm In slip frame, ready to hang. €795.00
     
  • ‘Tis (All before us)'

    Oil on Canvas,

    180cm x 120cm

    ‘Tis – the west of Ireland abbreviation of ‘it is’ is a term I love to hear. The softness of it fills me with affection.

    ‘Tis was also the title of Frank McCourt’s second memoir. Following on from his best-selling ‘Angela’s Ashes’which portrayed the bleakness of Ireland in the earlier half of the last century.

    While we still enjoy significant rain fall, Ireland of today is vibrant. In spite of challenges economic and social, we are as a people – I feel, forward looking. And our landscape is abundant – it holds and inspires us all.

    ‘Tis’– this painting, is about looking forward. It was made in many, many layers and gave its own set of challenges.  When composing a painting, I am not looking for likeness but sensation – the feeling of coming home or being home. Place is important but not in a  geo map specific way. I am creating sense of place.

    Just as happiness is never  truly a thing but more a feeling. I am endeavouring to evoke that feeling when you round the Irish coastline and the views, as Seamus Heaney so beautifully set the scene in his poem Postscript  “.. catch the heart off guard and blow it open”.

  • A Bird Set Free

    2,250.00
    I often say my work is best described as holding on and letting go. Letting go of all the doubt, fear and  notions and holding on for the good stuff to come through. This painting was years in the making – it just wouldn’t quit! I turned it to the wall for a while and then, one evening, it sort of painted itself. It was a time when I was attempting to close out my Mayo Lakes series but they kept turning up on the canvas. This is  a sort of swan-song to my Mayo Lakes series,  bridging the gap to The Big Sky collection that followed. It is, I think, about devotion –  redemption and renewal –about new beginnings and moving on to new, ancient landscapes.   Oil on canvas 100cm x 75cm in slip frame

     

  • Oil on canvas 50cm x 40cm Ready to hang in slip frame

     

  • Oil on canvas 45cm x 35cm Ready to hang in slip frame The back strand at Lacken in North Mayo is one of the most breath-taking places I have ever been. It's wide and long and surrounded by huge, high dunes. In the early part of the year, a breeze blows directly across the beach creating gentle gusts of sand - it feels otherworldly and a bit magical - as if for a few moments you are suspended between worlds,  neither holding on or letting go.  
  • While on residency at The Ballinglen Artists Foundation, I walked a lot on Lacken Strand. In 6-weeks I only ever met 2 other people on the lovely, long strand. During these walks, ideas would percolate - some good, some bad. It's hard to know in the solitude of a retreat if you're on the right track or veering off down (another) blind alley but the constancy of contemplation on these walks helped to refine the  body of work that is 'The Big Sky' . Most times on these walks I would document those thoughts in a notebook and it is these ramblings - thoughts and tangents - that underpin this love letter to the world from Lacken. Oil on Canvas 45cm x 35cm in Slip Frame
  • Oil on canvas 100cm x 70cm SOLD Painted in a series of breathy layers, ‘A Second Coming – In Ciarraí’ was made while on residency in Cill Rialaig, in Kerry. It commemorates the life of a friend. My residency was in January when the world seemed slowly to begin again. From high up on Bolus Head during those short, moist days, I wondered how do we distinguish time and mark out days. Indeed, how do we capture the essence of a life – but in breaths. And so this painting was made slowly in lots of very loose layers. I wanted to paint like breath on glass – similar to the way weather, hovering between sea and sky, makes a ghostly impression over The Skelligs. The painting became a sum of it’s parts – lots of light layers which, when combined attempt to capture the essence of light and a life.    

     

  • Oil on canvas 40cm x 40cm Ready to hang in slip frame This painting is another song of praise, an ode to the sea as it renews, invigorates and keeps us buoyant - leading us homewards.
  • A Turn For Grace

    9,650.00

    A Turn For Grace

    I read a headline many years ago titled ‘A stage for the performance of heaven’. The article* discussed how the Calder Valley had been poet Ted Hughes ‘tuning fork’.  I loved the notion of inspiration as a wide open plain. It seemed boundless, yet active.     I have the article pinned above my desk – it feels like a talisman, a reminder to stay in my lane, plough on and stretch out into infinite possibilities.    It seems the sea is both my ‘stage’ and ‘tuning fork’.  it is the place I draw inspiration and it is a deep well. Making this painting was long and challenging. Made in fifty-plus layers of heavy oils, it was my largest sea painting to date, and the process, while (comma) often filled with joy, was at times tumultuous.   Hughes referred to Scout Rock (the view from his childhood home) as ‘"my spiritual midwife at the time, and my godfather ever since".  It is the perfect summation of my relations with the sea – a place of possibility and renewal. I am guided by it. This painting being a case in point. When the going got tough, a little too challenging, a gap seemed to appear in a wave and guide me on to grace. Oil On Canvas: 152cm x 152cm In Slip Frame Ready To Hang
    
    
  • Oil on canvas 100cm x 70cm Ready to hang in slip frame  
  • At Valentia

    2,550.00
    Oil on canvas 40" x 30" (i.e. 102cm x 76cm) Ready to hang in slip frame I am a fan of islands but despite having spent much of my painting time in Ciarraí, I have only recently started to document Valentia island.  I love the sea-crossing - short as it is - and Bray Head, and the lapping water at ever side. I love too that you can go way, way high up and low down again into the sea. This is one of my first paintings from this place - it was made following a stormy Summers crossing.
  • Oil on canvas 76cm x 51cm Ready to hang in slip frame Mayo has some magic places, DownPatrick Head being a case in point. It's the edge of Ireland and not for the faint-hearted. The sea lashes it for much of the time - making for dramatic sea spray and the foamiest, thundering current but then at other times it is all calm - like at day break when the sun steals its way in silence into the sky. The stormy times are not forgotten, but behind us now as we begin again.  
  • Begin To Hope

    8,750.00
    Oil on canvas 180cm x 120cm In slip frame ready to hang These larger paintings have been stirring inside me for the past few years. It has been a pleasure to see them finally come to fruition in the studio. I am forever saying my work is ‘holding on and letting go’ . There may be more robust, verbose words for my process but the practice of turning up, letting go of all my notions and hang ups and holding on for inspiration, flow and the good stuff (that feels to my mind like fire)  is essentially how I find and harness inspiration. Begin to Hope feels like a line I am making by walking, beyond the fertile void, it is of itself spilling out into the world at large        
  • Oil on canvas 45cm x 35cm Ready to hang in slip frame While on a fellowship at The Ballinglen Arts Foundation at the beginning of this year, I used to walk the shoreline at sunset. Most usually I was alone on the beach with my thoughts and it was a lovely opportunity to exercise my mind and body. It occurred to me  late on one of those evenings how the sea is so soothing - inhaling and exhaling in a rhythm as it does. Funny to get to my age before realising how the sea shows us how to breathe.  
  • Oil on canvas 40" x 30" (i.e. 102cm x 76cm) Ready to hang in slip frame The sea adjoining Ciarraí can often catch colours of the tropics - turquoise and fizzy greens that don't quite match our inky skies. I have been greatly infleunced by Sorolla this past year - visiting his studio in Madrid and seeing his shows in London and Dublin. I wonder how he might have painted our sea - with all the drama but not so much sun, I imagine the Spaniard may have had much to say in paint.
  • Oil on canvas 40cm x 40cm Ready to hang in slip frame There is a motion in the ocean that helps - I think - to move forwards out of 'stuckness' and  onwards. The constancy of the sea and holding on and letting go are a constant theme for me.  

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