New beginnings

9th September, 2021

Summertime 2019

Well! 2019 proved to be a productive year for a change of approach to painting which I had felt was coming for some time.

The desire to work in colour was overwhelming after the blue monotonal work I had been doing. The rest of the year was spent experimenting with paint,and new ways of working in relation to colour. rather than a body of work I did a series of paintings that were really one off paintings, that while entities in their own right,, needed more consolodation and focus in terms of where they were going. They were however, the lead into two new bodies of work that are consolidated.

The mono printiong course at Southampton City Gallery opened up new channels for me. Ecploring textures and forms via monoprinting and combining it with painting was as, it were an accident waiting to happen but in a very good way. The textures and surfaces I had alrady been experimenting with took on a real focus as I realised their implication regarding deeper elements that would propell the one off work produced in the summer of 2019 into a new realm and consolidate the way forward for two bodies of work that were both focused and a journey of discovery.

It was already Autumn before this happened, but I was now developing a real focus on who I was both as an artist and person, in terms of narrative, and the culture that lies within the land, that I had experienced on my travels to Skye, also travels made as a child to the west of Ireland where my mother came from. Going forth on my visual journey now encompassed the notion of heritage. Narrative had become a symbiosis with painting.

The painting shown here is called Summertime, and is one of a varied selection of paintings from 2019 that reflects experimentation and the journey to the body of work produced from 2020-2021