I want my paintings to be like African music - colourful, social and full of light.

Sometimes I see art as a kind of research - experimenting with the same idea over and over again i.e. the cityscape. And rather than being boring it gets more interesting, a visual exploration, a way of seeing. The changes or differences are more subtle but the viewer can see them. What also happens is that you create a world i.e. the picture stops being a picture and suddenly becomes 3 dimensional like you are looking through a window, or a kind of periscope allowing you to look over the wall and turn around to see what is going on. In this way the life of the city can be observed, and so we move a long way from the 'picture' towards the realm of the documentary film.

The problem for me regarding much art is that style is predominant and not content. This is like citing the right bands you like to be allowed to join a band so that you will continue producing more and more of that same style. Art for art's sake has become style for style's sake. Great songwriters write about life around them, style comes second.

In a way the more local you become the more global you become. Think of a particular famous cheese in Italy or wine in France. We, the world, like it not because it is global, but because we see it as so local. If art is about 'anything' then it becomes subject to cosmopolitan strictures which in turn become like international airports - they all look the same. Dublin is near me, I grew up here. I know it well. It contains the endeavours of many Irish people through the centuries. Ultimately, every local has global implications because of common or shared human experience.
 

‘Dublin: A City of Contrasts’ (2007)
Series of Oil Paintings 

A city – a free city – was where a man could be most fully a man. The Romans took this for granted. To have civitas – citizenship - was to be civilised, an assumption still embedded in English to this day. Life was worthless without those frameworks that only an independent city could provide. A citizen defined himself by the fellowship of others, in shared joys and sorrows, ambitions and fears, festivals, elections, and disciplines of war. Like a shrine alive with the presence of a god, the fabric of a city was rendered sacred by the communal life that it sheltered. A cityscape, to its citizens, was therefore a hallowed thing. It bore witness to the heritage that had made its people what they were. It enabled the spirit of a state to be known.
Tom Holland  Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic

The Dublin of today is a far cry from the Dublin of the 1980s when it was said to resemble London directly after the Second World War, so numerous were its run-down buildings and empty sites. In the last 10-15 years much of the city has been renovated or rebuilt. The success of the ‘Celtic Tiger’ has given the Irish people historically unprecedented wealth and attracted many immigrants from all over the world. This can all be seen in a brief walk around the city centre. The new (and expensive) cars glide past African and Polish shops while people from many different ethnic and cultural backgrounds mingle around the Spire and the GPO on O’Connell St.  

The Dublin we see today is a snapshot in time, hiding its past while only leaking hints of where its future will lie. For example, the new O’Connell St with its squared-off designer trees and generous paving hides the felling only the year before of a row of 100-year-old trees that witnessed the 1916 Easter Rising. Looking to the future it seems likely that Liberty Hall, Dublin’s only modernist ‘skyscraper’ and prominent if unloved symbol of Dublin, will be demolished soon in favour of a more modern or even postmodern replacement.

The Dublin of today has many contrasts, symbolic of shambolic planning yet with many hopeful idealists struggling against the odds. Witness the Liffey Boardwalk in contrast with the traffic-jammed quays; the huge reduction of plastic signs (the scourge of the 1970s and 1980s) in contrast with the monotony of quick-rise apartment block and shopping centre developments.  

Yet older areas of the city like Moore St and Parnell St, which were going into decline as the more affluent Irish moved to greener pastures, are seeing extraordinary multicultural changes as immigrants set up shops and restaurants with a never-before-seen range of food, goods and menus. Indeed the culinary tastes of the new visitors and inhabitants have created a demand for exotic vegetables, fruit and seafood never even contemplated by their Irish neighbours.

The relatively recent wealth of Dublin and many of its citizens (symbolized by the number of Brinks vans leaving the cosmopolitan Grafton St as shoppers enter it) may also be a snapshot in time as the uncertain economic future of rising interest rates, peak oil, and global warming threatens to bring the whole economic façade tumbling down like the crumbling slum dwellings of the 1960s.

The statues of historical figures such as Jim Larkin, Daniel O’Connell, Charles Stewart Parnell, and James Connolly look down on a new city that sits uncomfortably with their varieties of nationalism and socialism.

These symbols of the past, standing in silent judgment of the follies of the present, act as control rods in the current economic fission reminding its old and new, wealthy and poor citizens alike of past struggles and hardships. 

The aim of this series is threefold:

1 To depict Dublin as it is in this moment in time, recording current states, trends and aspects that we take for granted but can change tomorrow.

2 To examine particular contrasts that have emerged due to current levels of wealth and immigration. 

3 To represent aspects that symbolize positive developments for the future of Dublin and all of its inhabitants.

 

At work on Strolling Player, Liffey Street, Dublin

Art and Identity (2007)
Talk given at Dublin City University's Centre for Consumption Studies Workshops  on October 17 (See here ...)

Stages of 'The Millionaire in Spirit'  painting (2007)
See stages of new The Millionaire in Spirit painting or view slideshow

Stages of 'Waiting in the Sun' painting (2007)
Series of photographs of 'Waiting in the Sun' painting taken from beginning to completion. (See here ...)

War Triptych (2006)
The First World War was to a large extent the war of the First World re-carving global markets with the intention of obtaining a greater share for themselves. (read on ...)

Artist’s Statement (2005)
The word ephemeral derives from the Greek ephémeros and means ‘lasting a day’. It is a word particularly suited to newspaper images (read on ...)

Some Notes on Political Art (2005)
What is political art? What makes art political? It is very difficult to define political art. Views on what makes art political can range from (read on ...)

Pearse, Connolly, Larkin Triptych (2005)
If Magritte made it clear that all art consisted of symbols of people and objects and not the real world itself then (read on ...)

Quotes on Art and the City

The life of our city is rich in poetic and marvellous subjects. We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvellous; but we do not notice it.
Charles Baudelaire

It is much easier to decide outright that everything about the garb of an age is absolutely ugly than to devote oneself to the ask of distilling from it the mysterious element of beauty that it may contain, however slight or minimal that element my be. By 'modernity' I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.
Charles Baudelaire

One of the greatest difficulties besetting me has always been the choice of subject. My inclination being strongly the illustration of modern life, I had read the works of Dickens in the hope of finding material for the exercise of any talent I might possess; but at that time the ugliness of modern dress frightened me, and it was not till the publication of Barnaby Rudge, and the delightful Dolly Varden was presented to us, that I felt my opportunity had come, with the cherry-coloured mantle and the hat and pink ribbons.
William Powell Frith

I don't think that the station at Paddington can be called picturesque, nor can the clothes of the ordinary traveller be said to offer much attraction to the painter - in short, the difficulties of the subject were great and many were the warnings of my friends that I should only be courting failure if I persevered in trying to paint what was in no sense pictorial.
William Powell Frith

Our lives take place in rooms and streets that have their own special laws of light and visual language.
Edmond Duranty

The new city embodied the social and economic instabilities of the Capitalist age. Moreover anonymous people of all social classes rubbed shoulders in its public places on a scale hitherto unknown.
Christine Lindey



Quotes on Creativity

One must always always work, and a self-respecting artist must not fold his hands on the pretext that he isn’t in the mood … I have learned to master myself and am glad I’ve not followed in the footsteps of those Russian colleagues who have no self-confidence and no patience, and throw in the sponge at the slightest difficulty.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

The image, it is clear, must be set between the mind or senses of the artist himself and the mind or senses of others. If you bear this in memory you will see that art necessarily divides itself into three forms progressing from one to the next. These forms are: the lyrical form, the form wherein the artist presents his image in immediate relation to himself; the epical form, the form wherein he presents his image in mediate relation to himself and to others; the dramatic form, the form wherein he presents his image in immediate relation to others.
James Joyce A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

The artist spends the first part of his life with the dead, the second with the living, the the third with himself.
Pablo Picasso

The highest condition of art is artlessness.
Henry David Thoreau

Without emotion, art is lifeless; without intellect art is shapeless.
Charles Johnson

The difference between art and science is that science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else.
Donald Knuth

The true work of art continues to unfold and create within the personality of the spectator. It is a continuous coming into being.
Mervyn Levy

That which is static and repetitive is boring. That which is dynamic and random is confusing. In between lies art.
John Locke

Art must not stop at the level of pleasing eyes.
Li Shan

True art is not an expression of the self. Art is about the feelings that belong to all living people.
Aleksander Titovets

Painting is an intermediate somewhat between a thought and a thing.
Sydney Smith

The piano is the centre of my musical discoveries. Each note that I write is tried on it, and every relationship of notes is taken apart and heard on it again and again.
Igor Stravinsky

The drops of rain make a hole in the stone not by violence but by oft falling. 
Lucretius

Jackson Pollock found it difficult to get the public at large to accept his art but he knew that if you threw enough mud at the wall some of it was bound to stick.
C Ó Croidheáin

A word of advice: don't paint too much direct from nature. Art is an abstraction, derive this abstraction from nature while dreaming before it, and think more of the creation that will result.
Paul Gauguin

[A]nyone who prefers to have his peasants looking namby-pamby had best suit himself. Personally I am convinced that in the long run one gets better results from painting them in all their coarseness than from introducing a conventional sweetness.
Vincent Van Gogh

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
Scott Adams

Action is the foundational key to all success.
Pablo Picasso

What a funny thing painting is. The abstract painters always insist on their connection with the visible reality, while the so called figurative artists insist that what they
really care about, is the abstract qualities of life.
Marlene Dumas

I think the twentieth century is just that.. the process of artists rushing through the world and finding some part of the non-art world and bringing it into the art world, minus
its context.
Tony Cragg

Let it be no more said that the Empires encourage arts; for it is the arts that encourage Empires.
William Blake

Usually I am on a work for a long stretch, until a moment arrives when the air of the arbitrary vanishes, and the paint falls into positions that feel destined.
Philip Guston

Seeing is so important that the [visual] system will not quit even when the quantity of the data is meagre and the quality of data is abysmal.
Roy Sorenson

Painting and art have never had the same agenda. Art is a much newer argument than painting. Painting has been around for 25,000 years. Painting is commemorative. Art, on the other hand, is a kind of discourse that in a funny way seeks to do away with itself.
Stephen Westfall

Modernist abstraction resumed the trend begun by Aestheticism, in that it expressed the conviction that only by a drastic restriction of its field of vision could art survive. With the least strain of embellishment possible in a formal language, art became increasingly self-referential, in its search for a "purity" that was hostile to narrative. Guaranteed not to represent anything, modern painting is consciously nothing more than a flat surface with paint on it.
John Zerzan

Painting will have to deal more fully and less obliquely with life and nature's phenomena before it can again be great.
Edward Hopper

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
Aristotle

We can all agree that the peculiarity of an activity consists in using the means specific to it. But a means is specific to an activity in as much as it is apt to achieve the purpose that is specific to the activity. The particular purpose of a mason’s labour is not defined by the material he works on and the tools he uses. What, then, is the specific purpose that is realized by putting coloured pigments on a flat surface? The response to this question is in fact an intensification of the tautology: the specific purpose of painting is solely to put coloured pigments on a flat surface, rather than to people it with representative figures, referred to external entities situated in a three-dimensional space.
Jacques Rancière