About me

Welcome to my blog. I am happy to share work from current projects as well as some of my earlier work from New Zealand and London. There are two sections: painting and drawing. Enjoy and please feel free to leave a comment.

I have been following my passion for painting landscapes and cityscapes since 2000 when I graduated as a graphic design student from Central St. Martins College of Art and Design, London. Whilst developing my craft I worked in the art supplies industry gaining an extensive knowledge of materials and techniques. I have exhibited in a number of group shows in London between 2004 and 2008, in Ireland in 2008 and New Zealand in 2010. Since returning to Ireland in 2012 I have had a solo show at L'Atitude 51 wine bar and I currently have work hanging in Fenn's Quay and The Cornstore restaurants in Cork.

Artist Statement 

 Memory has always interested me. What we choose to remember can be very different to what was actually experienced. Just as everyone’s perception of life and reality are different so too are everyone’s memory of life events. How much of what we remember is reality and how much is influenced by our own thoughts, feelings and life experiences?

I like to think of memory as the distillation of images, a kind of fragmented reality. This is a theme that I am constantly exploring in my artwork, through the depiction of landscapes paintings and still lives. The exact nature of each work is influenced by my own particular life experiences. Although each and every person’s mind and memories are unique, my intension is to show how there are fundamental components that resonate visually in describing a ‘sense of place’.

The concept of sense of place or memory of a place first became significant in my London series which I started in 2005. I was interested in how certain scenes could hold significance by serving as a microcosm of change over time. Everyday suburban buildings, roof tops and domestic living spaces become a focus for describing a conflict with the forces of nature and social and economic modernization. I felt the need to omit human presence in order to best describe a true sense of place; a location with personality of its own. A place is stripped down to it main components and is in turn universally recognisable and familiar

Photography is a starting point for a lot of my work. I used it as a means of visual note taking when exploring the city and country side; describing the feeling or mood that a place emanates. I supplement this with sketches to record concepts. Most of my paintings are derived from images which have endured in my memory or they are based on recorded scenes that are particularly effective in describing the mood of a wider place. I believe that a combination of certain components such as weather,  light, a striking visual composition and visible references to common occurrences can all contribute to making a place memorable and worthy of painting

I see process always as being a big factor in my work. I always set parameters for myself in which to work. In my computer-based drawings in which I zoom in to the image so it becomes unidentifiable and then begin tracing the contours in one continuous line guiding the viewer over the entire artwork. My approach can be varied. When looking more closely at an image it becomes abstract in nature; the subject matter does not change but it becomes unidentifiable and lends itself well to a free experimentation without concern for accurate portrayal. One of my latest pieces ‘The Shed on the North Shore’ began by  ‘griding up’ the image and recreating each section individually as its own separate artwork. The work comprises 70 panels, each one representing a fragment of memory. Blowing up the image provided less definition and by painting ‘blind’ in terms the larger image I was free to introduce memory and understanding into the process of representation. This is something which I intend to investigate further in the future.