Bedroom at Dawn

Times of the year when daylight gets rapidly longer or shorter (late March and April, October) tend to bring out vivid dreams or nightmares for me. I wake at dawn. I’m exploring that in-between moment when the dream is still fresh and you’re not sure where you are. The wood of suicides from Dante’s Inferno features in the middle in the door area and various personal memories surround it. Limited palette of ultramarine blue, raw umber and bluish silver. I painted it in casein and it gives a unique look.

Claire Making Flower Bunches

In spring and early summer, I give a hand in my sister’s flower field. Planting seed trays and pots and weeding, it can be a busy time. This painting depicts Claire in the farm shed doing flower bunches. It’s late September and near the end of the flower season. I thought the composition would be interesting, surrounded by flowers fanning out and going sideways and down rather than the usual upright direction. I’ve not done a formal painting of her before.

Moon Jellyfish on Fota House Wallpaper

I’m with an artists collective, Mór Artists and in April we were invited to explore the wallpaper designs, as well as some of the rooms, in Fota House. Scanning through a folder of one of the wallpapers, this pattern struck me as unusual and an idea for putting something out of place against it made sense. As I’m immersed in the sea and the motif resembled the centre of moon jellyfish, I put the jellyfish against the wallpaper to explore incongruity, repetition and interference. I used homemade oils throughout and Michael Harding’s Warm White.

Petroleum Sea Foam 2

I recently saw a film about Hilma af Klint’s life. I needed a break from figurative painting so I did something more abstract. Acrylic paint is basically plastic so I wanted to explore the idea of pollution at sea, and how out of place yet beautiful to look at it can be. No two discs are the same. The natural background and white glow is oil paint.