We humans are great at inventing myths and falsehoods. So when the past is a foggy mess, where better to look than in your own attic, or basement, or garage. Start digging through all that old junk you thought was so useless and you'll get the picture. You know that sensation, - spending a whole day up to your neck in papers and scraps and beer mats until every so often you stop and fall back smiling, or weeping, or jumping with excitement or flinging something - a shitty mug maybe - into a far corner (hoping it will finally break). These are moments of truth, collected in your own private museum, because you knew someday the contents might just serve a purpose, put some clarity on events, or be that insurance policy against forgetting what you once said was unforgettable. ("No don't throw out that pizza receipt. Not that one! Not for THAT night!" (That crazy unforgettable night, which requires a cash receipt to underscore its life altering importance!!).
I am a hoarder. I keep E - V - E - R- Y - T- H- I - N - G! I kept an attic full of what might ostensibly be described as 'youthful art?work'; my early designatorial jibberish, which was kept because I am hoarder. Thankfully, I have recently discovered its value in a recent moment of dawning. If there is such a thing as an 'artist's epiphany', something like it seems to have happened to me recently. Despite having been scribbling, doodling, sketching and scrawling for years, I never really translated those things, which I was observing through the eyes of an "artist" (actually, to be honest, I have a dreaded fear of that word (what does it mean?). Over the years, I seem to have been responding to an unavoidable impulse to draw or paint by just transferring images in haphazard ways onto paper or whatever was at my disposal. I have continued doing this without ever considering what the motivation was or, indeed, the purpose. The result was not only technically poor outcomes, in a visual sense, but also "works" that seemed to have no real raison d'etre, (not to mention artistic purpose) and which never effectively satisfied my impulse to communicate in a representative manner. They got hoarded nonetheless.
I liked words as well. And I have used them a lot to vary effects in communicating a factual or fictional account of the world as I see it. In fact, I have often run away from the drive to paint and draw by throwing myself at the written word as though it were a safe and assured refuge. What folly! For all their familiarity, words are achingly complicated beasts and their many and nuanced faces often require long explanations to avoid misinterpretations and even those explanations themselves often require further quasi-surgical exfoliation. And all of that work demands the reader do that which most are unwilling to do - spend the time necessary to engage, wrestle and de-construct the words to understand a much greater whole. But the human brain is a visual machine. So, why spend a lifetime trying to convey artistic expression in words to a receptor that tends to fuse at most things non visual? Why enter the realm of doing something which others will spend a life time dissecting into other words. Or worse. In the world of words, there are those who take a glorious work of cinema, like say Lars Von Trier's "Melancholia", and dub it! I have, I am afraid, no words to communicate my quiet shock and bewilderment for the latter type of butchery, but I think this image sums up my opinion adequately. . .
So artistic expression in words is dangerous territory from the perspective of protecting the Work's integrity. Maybe that is why the the call to put in a visual context that which I have often been heretofore compelled (for want of artistic purpose, sense or sensitivity) to commit to words - has never been far away. And here comes the epiphany (ish).
Recently, I saw something very simple and it was not what it might have been. It ceased to be the object (a bottle in fact) and instead it became a compendium of things from colours, lights, shades with no boundaries or angles, no beginning and no end. Wait a second - so what does this mean? Seeing a bottle for the first time as a sort of compendium rather than 'a single thing' certainly does not suddenly make one "an artist" (did I say I still disliked that word?), nor does it suddenly render one technically competent to convey the movement to a fixed medium and thus creating a visual account of the world. But I became aware that things are now not things at all but multidues of intersecting universes of light and dark and colour and shade. Nothing is as it seems and yet everything is just as it is.
Knowing now, to some extent, how thick and full the air is (so to speak), I have been looking back at where I have come from (those hoarded bits and bobs I spoke about earlier). Despite their modest genesis, they tender some value in having been part of the journey to this little epiphany. Having reached a moment of clarity in an erstwhile extended creative purgatory, I can now objectively, I think, put some order or context on the things I have committed in paint or pastel or charcoal (or whatever) since my late teens and, in a way therefore, close one door in appreciation as another one of exploration opens. . . .
My very first effort was this piece of horribleness. It was done with watercolours (big mistake) on paper - copied from some art book or other. Yet it is instinctively important to me, because I chose to do it and I remember distinctly my obsession was with the dark place under the house with all those shadows and beams, which I was, for a heap of wholly explicable reasons, unable to capture. But as an initial excursion, it still reminds me of a lasting motivational subtext, which is a desire to see into shadows or beyond the seemingly apparent.
I soon followed, at the ripe old age of 17, with this "Bench in Shadow" inspired by an old calendar photo. Again it is sinful in that it is partly copied from a photograph but also for its utter absence of any technical sensitivity. (OK, from a distance its not that bad I suppose). However, it it speaks alot to my sense of the emptiness of the world, a theme to which I return with a significantly less plagaristic leanings.
In 1986, my parents gave me a gift of an oil painting course with Desmond Turner and while I can safely say that I never excelled with oils, I never left them since either. I like this "Bunacurry View" (1986) because the light on the grass is actually very well achieved for a first effort in oils (although, it is probably difficult to tell in this shoddy copy!)
The following two pen sketches I cling to as though they held bits of my soul locked within them. "Guinness with Barry" (1987) in the basement of Bruxelles Pub, in Dublin, was an on-site sketch I did while waiting for one Barry O'Brien to join me for a pint while we were both doing (repeat) exams in UCD in 1987. In it, I am set apart from the crowd, isolated in away. It is not a complaint! When I look at it now, I recognise it as a genuine first observation with a potentially artistic quality in that I instinctively placed the viewer in the same position as myself and the resulting world and emotion it emits is one of dislocation, not the fun one might expect with having a pint.
That sense of dislocation pervaded my time in UCD, (something I have not admitted much) a generally unhappy period of my life. I found the place huge, uninspiring, alienating and alien certainly to the world I grew up in on the West Coast of Ireland. This lakeside ("The Pond") sketch at UCD was drawn on a lovely warm summer day when I most likely would have wanted to hop on the back of one of those guls and fly away.
1989 was a creative time for me and another equally tortuous year. I was finally released from the hell that was UCD, but faced with a very uncertain future. This was nothing new for Ireland in 1989 being - as it was - in the midst of pretty dire economic circumstances. "Megalopolis" (1989) was my untrained but spontaneous summation of the world in that year. It still is one of my least concious and most honest pieces of work even if it lacks the trained hand of the draughtsman. But I do not mind that now, because when I look at it, it seems oddly prophetic and in some ways I think that is an element of an "artistic" observation.
Seósamh ó'Dálaigh's then fledgling gallery (Dálann Yawl - http://www.achillpainting.com/) was opening its doors (I think) for the second or third summer in 1989 on Achill Island. This too was an inspirational place in a bright large space in Dooega, which I visited often and where my creative instinct felt some sense of companionship (in a world, which otherwise expected or seemed to expect ordinariness, conformity, or the suit and tie life - or at least that was the devastating reality that I was somehow carving out for myself). Seósamh took my painting "Self" (1989) into a competition his gallery ran that summer and (incredibly, I thought) I won a prize for best portrait. I was, of course, thrilled because it was in fact a portrait of some endeavour (I crushed tinfoil over my face and painted the sculpted form with oil pastel). I did not really know how to articulate it then, but I think now it was a some sort of expurgation of my foundering and uncertain identity - the painting certainly has both a menacing and sombre, stoney quality. But, I did know that I wanted to achieve the effect of a sculpture - I was painting what I observed as a thinly disguised emotionally locked youth. Despite my reluctance, there is an emotional honesty to this painting, which I have rarely been able to express and so it remains deeply important to me.
Although "RED" looks like something I now think would make a good horror movie poster, it wasn't anything of the sort. The motivation might have been to show the world how I observed myself - perhaps loaded with anger. What I do like about this effort, which was my face pressed into red shoe polish, is that I was experimenting with ideas for transferring images. 
There is one painting (or pastel drawing) which speaks to me a little about the potential falsehood in the recent epiphany to which I referred above. Clearly, I was able to achieve form from a very limited amount of detail and there is a certain rudimentary impressionism in "Campfire". The observation here (inspired in La Defense, Paris) is for that reason, potentially, an unconcious leap. It has an innocuous quality of a park encampment, on the other hand it may be saying something about the extent of homelessness and squalor, which was to be found about suburban Paris in the early 1990's.
It was in Paris, in the eye of a better forgotten storm, that I did "The Letter" in January, 1992. The letter is only partially legible, allowing the viewer just to contemplate what it might be about, but the sometimes accidentally and simultaneously deliberate light-chalkiness of the pastel hand suggests an emotional context as does the blue pen (perhaps a cheap metaphor). While on the one hand (ehmm!), this piece is selfishly personal, on the other it represents for me a move to a form of artistic expression, which can - and I think does - deliberately invite the viewer's emotional engagement. It is also probably one of my most adored pieces.
Between 1989 and 1992 I went through a variety of turbulent bursts of (potential) creativity. Religion was never far from themes of oppressive dogma (as in my ridiculous, angsty yet charming "Christ Rig", which took inspiration from Salvador Dali and then popular movies like Planet of the Apes, Close Encounters and Apocalypse Now).
In "Tribal Crucifix" (1989) I was playing around with ideas of Celtic Christianity and Paganism drawing on culturally alien mofits from Asia to North America. But again, the motivation and intention probably outshone my technical capacities. While in "Untitled" (1990), I turned back to more emotional motivations.
There followed a relatively quiet few years. I came back from Paris and turned my attention to law and while in Galway (NUI), although heavily involved in the Arts Society (and took part in my first group exhibition there in December 1993), I only did a few portraits with varying degrees of success. But it was in 1997, having suddenly found myself with a set of watercolours and pastels in Quebec city, that I was inspired to paint the Chateau Frontenac in several sketches and pastel drawings, the best of which I think is a pastel drawing of that name (1997 (not shown), which I nearly got frostbite drawing on a discarded cardboard box. It is housed in my sister's (Neasa) house in Limerick. I am also pretty found of "Lodge" (1997), a watercolour I did on a sunny morning after New Year 1997 at Mont St. Ann (above).
The above is a selection of the period 1986 to 1997. There is a sizeable and disorganised portfolio, which, well, is probably happiest where it is. The samples are shown here as someplace for me to allow them stand as a sort of partial record. The next chapter will exhibit some later pieces and dabblings from 1997 until 2010. For now, I'll just close this section be returning to the 'epiphany' I mentioned at the outset.
Epiphany is, amongst other things, defined as a sudden, intuitive perception of or insight into the reality or essential meaning of something. The truth is my epiphany is more a re-awakening to something I have long underexploited or ignored or misfed or undernourished. There is, despite all the shortcomings, a clear narrative drive in my drawings, sketches and paintings and a naturalistic impulse to communicate in the visual - creative plane. What is clear now to me is that I am beginning to see both a "technical and observational light" onto which I can imagine imposing my observations, whether political, social, or otherwise, and turn perhaps from what are the potentially limiting capacities of written narratives to expressing the observed world in a visual context; - returning in a sense (no pun intended) to the homeland of human communication. Well, we'll see . . .
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