A really nice review of my work was written today by the artist and journalist Matthew Rose.
Here's what he had to say.
http://lalandedigitalpress.blogspot.com
Showing posts with label oil painting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label oil painting. Show all posts
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Monday, April 20, 2009
Downpour
Oh la! It's really raining. The light just vanished and the clouds unleashed a massive downpour. So I'll not be painting any more this evening. Might get some drawings in. The painting is only a third of the way through. You can see a bit of each layer. The charcoal drawing, the greyscale underpainting, and the colour in oils.
Here are a few pics. This is nothing on what I can see out the window right now. It's as dark as dusk. The lights are flickering here so I think the electricity might go off soon. Big storm rolling in.
It really is like Ireland now :)
Here are a few pics. This is nothing on what I can see out the window right now. It's as dark as dusk. The lights are flickering here so I think the electricity might go off soon. Big storm rolling in.
It really is like Ireland now :)
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Why go to the south of France?
If you're not going to paint the landscape, why go to the south of France?
Everyone talks about the south of France as though it is a heaven for artists. Not everyone who comes here paints the landscape. So why not Paris, there are surely a lot more galleries?
The reason that artists and art collectors both rave about the south of france is the light, the people and the history, the space it gives you to think and the changing seasons and colours. The best time to come to the south is not the summer. Despite that, tourists and artists alike flock here at that time. For those who live here, the summer is the least attractive season because of the heat & it's getting hotter of course.
We are in spring now and it's almost as green and rich looking as Ireland. The iris' are in bloom and trees are showing off their rich colours. Blossom is everywhere and plants I've never seen before are showing pink, white, purple & mauve. The light is gentle, yet bright. It's not hot, there is a cool breeze today.
The landscape varies from flat to hilly to mountainous very quickly. It's a human scaled landscape. Most structures are built from local stone. As people can travel so easily now, there are a lot more visitors by car during holiday seasons and land is more valuable to sell for housing than to farm. Despite this, farmers work and cultivate the land, producing the best wines and incredible vegetables. The quality of the food alone is a good reason to live here and always has been.
In the winter the light is perfect and there is no searing heat. Photographs rarely capture the magic of the more simple aspects of the landscape. Yet the artists eye is very impressed by even these parts because of the surprising sense of distance and perspective. The easily perceived definition on everything. The landscapes shines. It fills you up with a new sense of colour and an appreciation for values of light which will help you no matter what you are painting.
When you come here you have to grow into the land as well. We can't have the benefits of the city while enjoying contact with nature. Nature can't survive that. When you come here, be a farmer, an artist or a writer for a while & leave the TV behind.
Thursday, December 18, 2008
View with mountains and olive trees.
I've just finished an oil painting which will be a Christmas gift for my parents in law. They have a nice collection of paintings and appreciate art. The view is from their terrace looking towards an neighbors house with olive trees in the foreground.
Tuesday, September 02, 2008
Fr Declan
This weekend saw a major change for Irish people living in Paris. One of the rocks of the community has moved back to Ireland and will be missed. Fr Declan Hurley, our Chaplin and confidant, who has been here for the last 4 years has returned to his home town of Navan.
I met Fr. Declan when I first arrived in Paris. He was resident in the Irish College or College des Irlandais in the 5eme. My wife and I lived there for the first 5 months of the first year here in France and we have very fine memories of the time. Fr Declan was undoubtably one of the pillars of the society and he made the community there stronger.
The Irish parishioners commissioned a going away painting for him. A reminder of his stay here and of the college itself. It's painted in oils on canvas.
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Art and Money, August 2008
Hello
I've been learning a lot lately and chewing over the topic raised by most artists at one time or another. This is my observation and I'm sure that it's not correct in every context. I am speaking about the art of painting here but I refer to other means of creating through my writing as well. I hope you find it interesting.
The value of art.
When you talk about value you have to talk about some empirical measurement system. That's the kind of world that we have lived in for centuries now. For convenience I'll compare value to money. The value of art of course, goes beyond money and is a different thing entirely. It is of the unspoken and unspeakable things that it's value often comes from. I won't discuss the spiritual value, social or energetic value of art here. Another time perhaps.
There is a direct correlation between art and money. As money continues to appear to have little value more money is being translated into rare and valuable things such as gold, minerals and ....art.
Art as we define it, in all it's forms and the more rare forms the better, has always had a value. An intangible value. When it becomes increasingly obvious that it is to become increasingly rare, such as on the death of a particular artist, then the value of the art increases greatly.
This has been the case with other things such as rare flowers, furs and spices. At one time salt was more valuable than gold, economic systems were based on tulips, people went to war for bread. Now those things are more plentiful and have less effect on the economics of the world.
Art has been a constant. Artists have created beautiful jewelry, paintings, sculptures and great effort has always been exercised by the wealthy, well educated and intelligent to acquire art and be in the presence of it, for all sorts of reasons. Beauty not being the least of them.
So what's happening today and how does this relate to art as we know it. Well, there has never been a shortage of people calling themselves artists. Nor a shortage of art itself in some form or another. Everyone can be an artist to some degree. So what makes one art more valuable than another.
The rarity is the key thing which makes the difference.
So what is rarity? Well some art is historical. The artist is attached to great events or great people and the works that the person produces are of not just artistic value but also historical value. Historic value can also be associated with social events.
A great artist, charged with the energy of a dramatic social event records it in their art of the moment and somehow captures the sense of what has passed. They act as a marker for the event and the energy is recorded for future generations to understand better the context of what has passed. They are like a meteorite that lands from space and tells us something of the structure and potential of a distant world.
Other rarity is based on skill. Someone so skilled as to be connected to another sort of intelligence, to a level never seen before, like an Olympic athlete or someone like Albert Einstein. The artist, like the scientist, leaves a trace behind them which effects many generations to come.
Each artist can only produce so many pieces of art in their lives. Not all artists works are great. Like many of Picasso's early pieces. But he worked to refine himself, as well as his art. That requires time, intelligence, insight and determination. Most people would give up long before they reached the same point, even if they could. Some people cannot give up, it is a matter of life or death for many.
These people as well as the art they produce are rare. It requires much work, isolation and introspection. It also requires a determined desire to learn in an area where much has been written about the end product and almost nothing about the process.
Rothco wrote a fascinating book on the process which is not intelligible to everyone. None the less it is a fascinating insight into his life and inspirations. His art is often hidden away in the collections of powerful companies and families.
So art is often used as a currency among the super rich. Not just any art. They seek art from people who have reached further and have not been equaled or who have been significant historical figures such as Peter Paul Reubens.
As money increasingly looses it's value and as gold and other rare minerals become less difficult to take out of the earth, those involved in finance can see the value of the things around them shrinking. They wonder where to put their wealth. Hence the increase in the value of art during times of coming economic depression. The art may loose it's monetary value during those times, as does everything that does not provide food, heating and shelter but when things recover the value of the art also recovers and grows, whereas other items such as tulips, salt, microchips and gold may decrease as things improve.
This leads to the subject of those that monitor and control which artists can enter the art worlds hallowed halls of approval. Why should there be art dealers who say that one artist is accepted and another not? Well there is the comparison between art dealers at the highest levels and financiers.
These same people have a lot of control over whose art is traded. They control the movement of art and issue their mark of approval just as someone assesses a mineral as a piece of gold or not.
These days with the loss of the special luxury goods market, due to mass production many are turning to art as an alternative status symbol as well as investment. However we are also seeing the presence of mass produced art. in the past art has often been the result of a team of artists work, such as on a large sculpture or a tapestry. Then it is finished by the artist who is accredited with having conceived the piece but today the artist attributed with the creation of the work, may not have even conceived the idea for the piece. So even art is being undermined in it's value by the use of mass production and the use of marketing to promote a false value.
Things are changing and hopefully it will come out well. It does beg the question. What is art really. It's not just about who says it's good or not. It's merely that some people, recognising that some items called art have a rarity and are sought after are using those same items for trade and profiting in the process.
They don't necessarily have to have any love, respect or understanding of art to do this. Merely to know which pieces are regarded as valuable and what their last sales price was, how rare they are relatively, etc. There is no love of creation in that. No respect for real values or protection of the process of art or artists. They bring art down to the level of a commodity. Hence the desire of some to take advantage and mass produce designs and forms, marketing them as a commodity but calling it art.
The current way of trading art has resulted in this distance from it's real value. It's like a collector of butterflies who no longer sees the animals or appreciates that they have given up their lives in being in the collectors display.
He may merely catalog their names and species while flaunting his collection over other collectors without appreciating any longer why he became a collector in the first place.
Perhaps we can learn to appreciate living artists, the work they do and their various species without destroying the thing we love, through over intellectualizing or coldly measuring their financial value.
I've been learning a lot lately and chewing over the topic raised by most artists at one time or another. This is my observation and I'm sure that it's not correct in every context. I am speaking about the art of painting here but I refer to other means of creating through my writing as well. I hope you find it interesting.
The value of art.
When you talk about value you have to talk about some empirical measurement system. That's the kind of world that we have lived in for centuries now. For convenience I'll compare value to money. The value of art of course, goes beyond money and is a different thing entirely. It is of the unspoken and unspeakable things that it's value often comes from. I won't discuss the spiritual value, social or energetic value of art here. Another time perhaps.
There is a direct correlation between art and money. As money continues to appear to have little value more money is being translated into rare and valuable things such as gold, minerals and ....art.
Art as we define it, in all it's forms and the more rare forms the better, has always had a value. An intangible value. When it becomes increasingly obvious that it is to become increasingly rare, such as on the death of a particular artist, then the value of the art increases greatly.
This has been the case with other things such as rare flowers, furs and spices. At one time salt was more valuable than gold, economic systems were based on tulips, people went to war for bread. Now those things are more plentiful and have less effect on the economics of the world.
Art has been a constant. Artists have created beautiful jewelry, paintings, sculptures and great effort has always been exercised by the wealthy, well educated and intelligent to acquire art and be in the presence of it, for all sorts of reasons. Beauty not being the least of them.
So what's happening today and how does this relate to art as we know it. Well, there has never been a shortage of people calling themselves artists. Nor a shortage of art itself in some form or another. Everyone can be an artist to some degree. So what makes one art more valuable than another.
The rarity is the key thing which makes the difference.
So what is rarity? Well some art is historical. The artist is attached to great events or great people and the works that the person produces are of not just artistic value but also historical value. Historic value can also be associated with social events.
A great artist, charged with the energy of a dramatic social event records it in their art of the moment and somehow captures the sense of what has passed. They act as a marker for the event and the energy is recorded for future generations to understand better the context of what has passed. They are like a meteorite that lands from space and tells us something of the structure and potential of a distant world.
Other rarity is based on skill. Someone so skilled as to be connected to another sort of intelligence, to a level never seen before, like an Olympic athlete or someone like Albert Einstein. The artist, like the scientist, leaves a trace behind them which effects many generations to come.
Each artist can only produce so many pieces of art in their lives. Not all artists works are great. Like many of Picasso's early pieces. But he worked to refine himself, as well as his art. That requires time, intelligence, insight and determination. Most people would give up long before they reached the same point, even if they could. Some people cannot give up, it is a matter of life or death for many.
These people as well as the art they produce are rare. It requires much work, isolation and introspection. It also requires a determined desire to learn in an area where much has been written about the end product and almost nothing about the process.
Rothco wrote a fascinating book on the process which is not intelligible to everyone. None the less it is a fascinating insight into his life and inspirations. His art is often hidden away in the collections of powerful companies and families.
So art is often used as a currency among the super rich. Not just any art. They seek art from people who have reached further and have not been equaled or who have been significant historical figures such as Peter Paul Reubens.
As money increasingly looses it's value and as gold and other rare minerals become less difficult to take out of the earth, those involved in finance can see the value of the things around them shrinking. They wonder where to put their wealth. Hence the increase in the value of art during times of coming economic depression. The art may loose it's monetary value during those times, as does everything that does not provide food, heating and shelter but when things recover the value of the art also recovers and grows, whereas other items such as tulips, salt, microchips and gold may decrease as things improve.
This leads to the subject of those that monitor and control which artists can enter the art worlds hallowed halls of approval. Why should there be art dealers who say that one artist is accepted and another not? Well there is the comparison between art dealers at the highest levels and financiers.
These same people have a lot of control over whose art is traded. They control the movement of art and issue their mark of approval just as someone assesses a mineral as a piece of gold or not.
These days with the loss of the special luxury goods market, due to mass production many are turning to art as an alternative status symbol as well as investment. However we are also seeing the presence of mass produced art. in the past art has often been the result of a team of artists work, such as on a large sculpture or a tapestry. Then it is finished by the artist who is accredited with having conceived the piece but today the artist attributed with the creation of the work, may not have even conceived the idea for the piece. So even art is being undermined in it's value by the use of mass production and the use of marketing to promote a false value.
Things are changing and hopefully it will come out well. It does beg the question. What is art really. It's not just about who says it's good or not. It's merely that some people, recognising that some items called art have a rarity and are sought after are using those same items for trade and profiting in the process.
They don't necessarily have to have any love, respect or understanding of art to do this. Merely to know which pieces are regarded as valuable and what their last sales price was, how rare they are relatively, etc. There is no love of creation in that. No respect for real values or protection of the process of art or artists. They bring art down to the level of a commodity. Hence the desire of some to take advantage and mass produce designs and forms, marketing them as a commodity but calling it art.
The current way of trading art has resulted in this distance from it's real value. It's like a collector of butterflies who no longer sees the animals or appreciates that they have given up their lives in being in the collectors display.
He may merely catalog their names and species while flaunting his collection over other collectors without appreciating any longer why he became a collector in the first place.
Perhaps we can learn to appreciate living artists, the work they do and their various species without destroying the thing we love, through over intellectualizing or coldly measuring their financial value.
Monday, February 04, 2008
Portrait in tempera
To zoom in on the details in this painting click here.
Here's a photo of a painting that I did in two sessions last week. The first layer is a tempera and the second is oil. One over the other. The basic ingredients of the tempera and the oil are the same. Except that the tempera has the egg added. You do it all yourself, from dissolving the resin, mixing the ground pigment to thickening the oil in the sun for a few weeks. It's that process of being in touch with the materials that makes the painting very personal.
The model was very pleased with the painting too and took a photo of me at work. He's asked me not to post a photo of him beside it but I'm sorely tempted. Anyway here is the painting. It's not finished. There is more to do on it but I want the current paint to dry first, in a couple of weeks.
Friday, September 14, 2007
Whats up?
It's been very busy here for the last few weeks. I'm writing this post to take time out of the things that need doing. I've also noticed that gardening recharges the creative batteries very well, to my surprise and delight.
So, why have I been so busy and what is busy.
I think that things have kicked in because the other big project has been properly completed and is now no longer at the front / back of my brain. We spent the summer enjoying where we are and also doing what had to be done before the new Montessori school year restarted but that wasn't a huge deal. Two weeks of repairs, carpentry and bits and bobs. It doesn't seem like the big stress thing that it used to be and it isn't. The parents and the children are happy and so is Amelie. She's even finally earning a salary. People never believe that you may not take a salary in your first year of starting a new business just to make sure the ship stays afloat but it's quiet common. So that's effectively done! The school is autonomous and a new generation of better educated children sallies forth.
Which leaves me mentally and emotionally free to create my own world and that's what's happening.
In the last few weeks lots of new opportunites have presented themselves and I've grasped the thistle, as they say.
During the summer I painted a lot. Experimenting in new methods, doing a lot of work out of doors from life, doing a lot of drawing in my atelier, with my wife as the model. Then the phone started ringing.
Can I represent you at the London Affordable Art fair this October?
Would you consider taking part in the Art Ireland Exhibition in November?
Would you like to be represented in a new gallery opening this December, in Williamsburg, New York?
Yes!
In short:
Thursday 18 - Sunday 21 October
My work on sale at the London Affordable Art Fair.
Arlev Art Gallery, Stand D4, Battersea Park, London. http://www.affordableartfair.co.uk/visitor.html
From the 16th - 18th November 07, My work will be at stand Q3 of the
Art Ireland Exhibition in the RDS, Dublin, Ireland.
In December my paintings will go on show in an, as yet, unnamed gallery in Williamshire, Brooklyn, NY, USA.
More coming soon.
Busy, means painting a lot and other creative endevours. I still have a lot of work to do before the exhibitions this year but the work is developing well and I'm happy with it. I'll post some of the recent paintings and perhaps a film of the painting process later.
The weather has improved here too, thank goodness.
So, why have I been so busy and what is busy.
I think that things have kicked in because the other big project has been properly completed and is now no longer at the front / back of my brain. We spent the summer enjoying where we are and also doing what had to be done before the new Montessori school year restarted but that wasn't a huge deal. Two weeks of repairs, carpentry and bits and bobs. It doesn't seem like the big stress thing that it used to be and it isn't. The parents and the children are happy and so is Amelie. She's even finally earning a salary. People never believe that you may not take a salary in your first year of starting a new business just to make sure the ship stays afloat but it's quiet common. So that's effectively done! The school is autonomous and a new generation of better educated children sallies forth.
Which leaves me mentally and emotionally free to create my own world and that's what's happening.
In the last few weeks lots of new opportunites have presented themselves and I've grasped the thistle, as they say.
During the summer I painted a lot. Experimenting in new methods, doing a lot of work out of doors from life, doing a lot of drawing in my atelier, with my wife as the model. Then the phone started ringing.
Can I represent you at the London Affordable Art fair this October?
Would you consider taking part in the Art Ireland Exhibition in November?
Would you like to be represented in a new gallery opening this December, in Williamsburg, New York?
Yes!
In short:
Thursday 18 - Sunday 21 October
My work on sale at the London Affordable Art Fair.
Arlev Art Gallery, Stand D4, Battersea Park, London. http://www.affordableartfair.co.uk/visitor.html
From the 16th - 18th November 07, My work will be at stand Q3 of the
Art Ireland Exhibition in the RDS, Dublin, Ireland.
In December my paintings will go on show in an, as yet, unnamed gallery in Williamshire, Brooklyn, NY, USA.
More coming soon.
Busy, means painting a lot and other creative endevours. I still have a lot of work to do before the exhibitions this year but the work is developing well and I'm happy with it. I'll post some of the recent paintings and perhaps a film of the painting process later.
The weather has improved here too, thank goodness.
Wednesday, May 09, 2007
Narcissus Pickers
This painting is done in Oils and tempera on canvas.
It's for an exhibition in June.
Inspired by events in the south of france this spring.
It measures 150cm x 85cm
Monday, April 30, 2007
Sunday, February 25, 2007
Saraha 2
I painted this desert scene in June of last year. It happened quiet quickly and I was pleased with it. In October I looked at it again and realised that it was a little flat looking. This is often the case after some time has passed.
So I did a little more work on it.
Because I found a buyer and wanted a record of it I made a scan. Only yesterday I had the chance to see the two side by side.
It's amazing to see the two together and how much more dimension the new version has. It's good to leave a painting to sit for a while and let the painter mature a little.
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