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.
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.
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.
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.
eastcorkpainter 