I’ve been wanting to paint this sunset for a long time, the original reference photo was taken in January 2013. I painted it in my homemade oil paints. There’s nothing like a sunset at winter when the tide is going out and the sky is reflected in the wet sand. Twice the magic!
The highlighted parts of a rock I saw last December reminded me of a fetus. This led me thinking about the Kerry baby and Ann Lovett cases in the Eighties and how, up until recently in Irish society, the absolute worst thing for a young woman in Ireland to do was to get pregnant outside of marriage.
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.
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.
eastcorkpainter 