02/08/26
Studio eventually and some strange back and forth with - well - let’s call it ‘Blinding’ for now.
It has promise but it will be the usual high wire act between detail/exactness and loose expressive flow.
Mandy El-Sayegh - Louisiana Channel
“I’m trying to process this reality, because none of it makes sense.”
Mandy El-Sayegh
The Abu Ghraib Effect - intuitive association.
France-Lise McGurn - Louisiana Channel.
03/08/26
Zero power today.
04/08/26
Fleadh in full swing.
05/08/26
Dublin - Brilliant show by Nour Jaouda in Douglas Hyde Gallery - ‘Matter of Time’.
06/08/26
Late Night Art, Belfast.
07/08/26
“What do you want as a painter?” - a very random question, completely out of the blue on a Friday night.
Had to really think about this…
At it’s centre, my practice is about a physical necessity to process things / experiences that resist plain language or interpretation directly. Everyone carries a personal archive / history of experience. Quiet fragments shift or chang e in atmosphere - half remembered states.
When you try and articulate this shti verbally, it often gets reduced, distorted or blown out of proportion. Painting lets that physical language test that grey zone between recall and memory.
No memory is pristine. It’s full of gaps, erasures and emotional weight or contortions that make or exaggerate. I love how material can mirror that process - specifically the constant dance between the shape and structure of a drawing mark and the fluidity of paint. There can be both a friction and a harmony in putting the two against each other - that really gets me going in the studio.
At the end of the day, I'm not trying to paint a pristine likeness or make pretty pictures. Its trying to work at it and see if that physical buildup of marks can give shape to what sits just beneath the surface of memory.
Sometimes when merging imagery from sources far removed in terms of context, an alternate, fictive narrative or a memory that could have been (or never was) emerges.
09/08/26
‘Blinding’ - good progress on this. Removed the hand, so as to heighten ambiguity… Who or what is causing the shadow?
Happy with the work on differing tomes in the shadow on the face.
10/08/26
Minimal effort - should be fun!
11/08/26
12/08/26
Solar eclipse as seen on the 212.
Tonight - wrapping for Ennistymon.
13/08/26
16/08/26
Work lifted and off to first solo show in Republic. It's happening!
20/08/26
Long trek to Ennistymon. Nice to see poster for show in a shop in town before I set foot there.
21/08/26
