I made that splash precisely a year ago today. And what a year it’s been. I wanted to splash things from a height for a long time. Somehow New Year’s Eve 2019 was the perfect time. I remember stealing into the studio and making two cerise type pinks balanced with an apple green as my flying colours. I laid the large canvas flat on the ground and went upstairs to set up my ammunition.
Then I let fly with the pink, just abandoning myself to luck. It felt great. The darker pink followed, then the green. Once I had no paint left, I walked down to see the results.
The canvas had to stay flat on the ground for another week or so before it was dry enough to hang on the wall. I worked into it slowly over the coming months, in Spring I added a tall yellow shape with wings to lighten it a bit. A few months later, I painted the swath of red at the bottom, which seemed to bring order to the surrounding chaos.
The flower in the top left-hand corner came from working in my lockdown studio, surrounded by flowers. I think their colours seeped into a lot of the paintings osmotically. The linear blue structure at the bottom came from drawings I did while in Berlin.
For me, the splash is like a craziness in a piece of music that is somehow mellowed by an organised slow placement of different forms. It’s a dance of instant chaos and slow, methodical choices. I haven’t splashed paint in this way since, but looking at the video now all these months later, I want to do some more.
When flames and snakes are your neighbours, they can't help but be part of the story. This rough, heavy-duty cotton canvas has been in my studio for probably eight years. It was unprimed, so I spent months applying thin layers of oil paint before it went anywhere. I like the dryness that comes from all that soakage and the roughness of the surface. There were wildfires near the sea, and you could see the glow of orange at night in the distance. I was grappling with a shape similar to the one I am painting here back in Ireland. I tried it again when I got to Italy, but it wasn't until I saw the shape as a flame that it unlocked itself. On some of the smaller landscapes, these flames appeared …