I love the winter light on the beach, it feels like the genuine character of the place comes out.
View of Ballycotton Islands, November 2025
Tag Archives: photorealistic
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.
Rock in Summer
Dead Bird in a Water Filled Pot
Mam’s Hands in Hospital
During Mam’s last stay in hospital, her hands, unposed, just lying on the bed. We took her home a few days later, where she spent her last weeks. Thirty years of rheumatoid arthritis have distorted her joints but I see resilience rather than frailty in this.
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.
Valentines Day 2025 – Sold
This piece was well received at my recent solo exhibition in the Grainstore Ballymaloe. It depicts a rough sea, I only got into the sea for a proper dip twice in February. The lighthouse island can barely be seen above the sea. Homemade oils used, silver for the shadows around the waves.
Full Moon Sea Glow – Sold
This is my first time using casein paint as a medium. Casein, the main protein found in milk, has been used as a binder for paints for millenia, long predating oil paint. Schmincke, a German paint manufacturer, make a special binding medium. I mixed my powder pigments with the binding medium to make casein paint. They are quite runny when water is added so care is needed when water is mixed. My iriodin blue silver pigment created pleasing effects on the breaking foam in the foreground.
Cliff and Sky
Stranded Black Tree
eastcorkpainter 