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Welcome to My Blog
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Portrait Session
From time to time when the opportunity arises I ask a few friends or
visitors to pose for me. This is always a useful exercise, as I can become
familiarised with facial types, and expressions.
If you follow my work, you may spot some of these faces in a painting,
under another guise.
Many thanks to Allan, Philip and Lynne for their patience on this
occasion.
Ice Hockey Paintings
On my last Blog, I wrote about our stay in Canada, and going to watch the
Ice-Hockey.
I also said I would show a few of the paintings which I completed, where I
tried to capture something of the colour and action.
I felt the approach to these paintings needed to be different to my
Traditional Irish work - so I chose to work these with a pallette knife on
canvas boards (16" x 16").
It was not my intention to paint any particular team colours, etc, but more
to try to capture the speed and skill of the players on the ice.
I was quite pleased with these two paintings, as I felt the aggression
showed as well as the skill involved in the game.
The Canadian Connection
Have spent this morning loading up some photos of our Canadian trips. We were
fortunate to spend quite a lot of time in Vancouver, visiting son Philip and
his wife Lynne.
The first few trips were simply holidays, but on our last trip we were able
to spend a much longer time with them. Naturally, my thoughts turned to the
scenery and other aspects of life in Canada, with a view to painting some of
these. As a treat, we were taken to an Ice-Hockey match to watch the Vancouver
Giants, and as well as being a thoroughly entertaining evening, I was really
inspired by the wonderful speed and action of the game - so much so, that I
could not wait to have a go at painting some of these furious encounters.
I'll show some of the resulting paintings on my Blog in a few days time. We
were really fortunate to be there on the night of the 'Teddy Bear Toss', which
is a special Christmas event (see Photo page 5). Hope you like the photos.
Expelled!
Tag, the smaller shaggy one,is a recent addition to the family. This as you
may guess caused Halo to be a bit miffed - but after a couple of weeks ,when
pecking order had been established, they began to get on very well together. At
some point each day there is what is now called the mad half hour when they
have a rumpus and chase each other to exhaustion. When this starts in the
studio, they have to be removed. I think they are saying in the second picture
'What could we possibly have done?'
Halo and Tag start their nonsense in the studio again - As a result they
are expelled....
The Rescue
Here is a stop frame video of my latest painting 'The Rescue'. Its taken me
several days to put this together, I hope you like it.
This painting was inspired by one of the many surprising and unexpected
aspects of life in north Donegal.
My wife and I moved there at the approach of winter in 1998, totally
unaware of what to expect, and we have to give a Big Thankyou, to our
neighbours for the number of times they had to help us and keep us right, in
our ignorance and naivety.
For a long time, it has been the dream of many Irish artists to live and
paint on the west coast of Ireland and Donegal in particular. So following on
in that tradition, my turn had come. Painting outside on a peat - bog or at the
beach in the west of Ireland, as in many other places, can be fraught with all
kinds of difficulties and inconveniences - like wind, sand, rain and midges. My
preferred location was the peat - bog with Mt. Errigal and the surrounding
mountains in the background, but this location tended to present all of the
above problems except sand. I fairly quickly therefore chose to use my sketch -
pad and camera on my trips out looking for subject matter, and was often
fortunate enough to come upon scenes like the one I have just painted here.
