I bought this green years ago when I was travelling. Oh god, do you remember when you could travel!
I never used it - I never had a reason to use it. I never knew what colours it would go with. But since I have been in lockdown, in a shed surrounded by a tiny garden, green is coming into my eye a lot, and it's coming into my paintings as well.
It's a very unusual colour for me to use. I usually only use a certain type of green, and this isn't it. But before I knew it, I was painting this abstract vine shape around this white sculptural object.
On the left, I have this rising abstract Jacobs ladder which, I'm gonna go look at now. It's not a particularly nice green that I like, I have to be honest, but it's good to try different greens. I think you're influenced by your surroundings.
Routes are created by choices, taking you to known spaces or surprises. Paintings take many paths. When I start to work on a new canvas, I have no idea where it will go, literally and figuratively. So I take any chance to travel and bring my work with me in whatever form possible, like these paintings I started in Ireland and brought to Italy. I like the (long!) drive to Italy - it’s a great time for …
In this studio vlog, I am switching it up between shaping wax sculptures and working on large oil paintings. I made a huge patch of yellow oil paint, and you can see me using it on several canvases. I often paint on several canvases at the same time. Yellow is one of the first colours of spring. The plants outside have …
The oil paintings locked me out, and I couldn’t paint, but luckily my wax for the bronze sculpture saved me. I like working in wax. It’s a great medium that allows you to get lost in the process. I also began painting into these tiny etching prints with acrylic and ink. The line drawing in these is very different from painting in oil. I think the time spent working on the etchings loosened me up enough to return to the oils on canvas, and you can see how I am finding my way back to them towards the end of the video. I am enjoying painting in oils, but the paintings I am working on at the end of …
I started making things. They could be three-dimensional drips or unskilled brushstrokes that invade the space in and around the paintings like a crude stage set.
‘Space is the breath of art’ - Frank Lloyd Wright
Being locked down, I emptied the garden shed and moved in there to paint for a while. It's a bright space made from pretty much all recycled materials. I forgot how nice it was to hang out in here. I like the two front doors. I got them from a Chinese restaurant near
Sometimes things remind me of other things out of context. The steel surface of this bin in Berlin reminds me of tree bark. One of my favourite...
It probably sounds a bit iffy when I say that something came to me in a dream but last night something did. When I walked passed my paintings this morning an image I dreamt about came back to me. I ran over, took up a dirty oil paint brush and sketched it on the back of a canvas. Later, over coffee, I sketched the motif a ...
A few weeks ago I worked with Johnny Bugler to create a set of prints that I could paint on to. The idea came to me when I found some etching proofs I had worked on in 2007. I see these etchings as a background, an elaborate canvas. They are an attempt to create the essence of a bit of linen that was laying around the studio for while, picking up colour debris and studio DNA, before being stretched up and becoming a painting. Working on the etching plates...
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 …