• Oil on canvas 124cm x 112cm In slip frame, ready to hang. SOLD You have to keep your wits about you in the sea. Sinking or swimming are ultimate options. As  a very recent - and occasional - sea swimmer, I love the immediacy of immersion. It's impossible to feel wishy washy about the sensations. 0.5 seconds after immersion you are fully alive - senses accelerated, at absoute optimum. Although I am in possession of a rambly mind - and prone to projecting forwards or harking backwards, I am a fan of being in in the moment. Sea swimming helps me be 'all in' and be fully alive one moment at a time.  
  • Oil & Cold Wax on Canvas 120cm x 100cm in slip frame ready to hang This painting was made in many, many layers. I started it in my early explorations of cold wax and returned to it - adding layers and experience  - over years. The crosshatching motion of the work over time gave depth and seemed to embody the experience of the painting. It isn't specifically about any place but is something of a journey-man painting - as it takes the essence of my experiences over several artists' residences across choppy lakes and along moody shorelines. Although the palette is dark it is ultimately an uplifting piece - signaling home in the midst of a torrent.  We are never forever, truly lost, we can always re calibrate, chart out course and navigate our way towards a sense of home.  
  • Oil on canvas 125cm x 112cm This large painting happened immediately after I had taken a short holiday in Rosslare last Summer. It was such a lovely little holiday - I had spent most of my childhood Summers in Wexford - so doing the 'borough' beach walk every morning felt - in someways like re-enchanting a long, held connection.  
  • Oil on canvas 40" x 30" (i.e. 102cm x 76cm) Ready to hang in slip frame Valentia Island - as a location - had a pivotal and pioneering role in transatlantic communications. I find walking alone the shoreline and swimming very inspiring - it so often translates into my work. While I find abundance in the waves, it makes me think Marconi must have had a magic, marvelous mind to see so much potential beyond those waves.
  • Oil on canvas 120cm x 100cm SOLD   The Outliers is the culmination of 10 years painting here in Ireland. It is from my first studio collection, that is –the first collection I have made from my studio rather than in response to a particular residency. It’s a reflection of 10 years of residencies and time out painting in Ireland, an amalgam of places I’ve painted – and a sort of hybrid of influences. By definition, an outlier is ‘is an observation point that is distant from other observations’. I like to think of the outliers as an outcrop of  mythical islands just beyond my imagination – a sort of painting odyssey – a sort of unreachable destination I am happily propelling myself towards and constantly striving to capture.

     

  • 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 100cm x 70cm SOLD From ‘The Outliers’ collection, which marks ten years painting in Ireland, ‘On Solid Ground’ is a painting that is a reflection on and a distillation of 10 years of residencies and time out painting in Ireland. It was painted in my studio but brings together an amalgam of places that have bolstered, sustained and influenced my painting practice. In his book ‘The Outliers’, Malcolm Gladwell asserts that it takes 10,000 hours practise to master a skill. Some time during the past decade in Ireland, I have crossed over that threshold which has delivered me to this solid ground.  

     

  • Dun Briste, a significant stack of land was sliced clean off Downpatrick Head hundreds of years ago. Folklore has it, that it was our own St. Patick who separated the land with his crozier in consternation with a non-believer who was slow to sign up. Regardless of the tall tales, the sight of that stack of land in the midst of the wild sea and contemplating the gap between the landmasses can't but move a body.  The vastness of the scene is humbling but also an opportunity  - a jumping off point  - in which to make your own departure, your own interpretation of the landscape and life. Oil on Canvas 45cm x 35cm in Slip Frame  

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