bird god

today i made a sinister bird god out of wire and safety pins

contextual studies

Swimmer ,Eric Ravilious

Pond , Paul Nash

Paul Nash ,Paradise Garden

For as long as I can remember I have had a fascination with ponds , streams and small damp landscapes , wells and small ruins . They are manageable and I feel secure and in control . The sea is like a crowd of new people , maybe like starting art school , the people crash in on you like waves , unpredictable and possibly dangerous .  

Pond , Paul Nash

 “Excuse me, I said. I thought you were a trout stream.
I'm not, she said.” 
― Richard Brautigan, Trout Fishing in America

Your Catfish Friend

If I were to live my life
in catfish forms
in scaffolds of skin and whiskers
at the bottom of a pond
and you were to come by
one evening
when the moon was shining
down into my dark home
and stand there at the edge
of my affection
and think, “It's beautiful
here by this pond. I wish
somebody loved me,”
I'd love you and be your catfish
friend and drive such lonely
thoughts from your mind
and suddenly you would be
at peace,
and ask yourself, “I wonder
if there are any catfish
in this pond? It seems like
a perfect place for them.” 
― Richard Brautigan, The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster

Andie Goldsworthy , I like this I like cold damp places

 In my dreams ponds are always dark , deep and often filled with scary things. This is a sea lampery it is a primative many toothed parisite as big as your arm and can be seen at the bottom of the shannon at o briens bridge in may , a scary encounter                                                            
                                                 

I obviously find the church sinister or if not, I think it makes for an interesting painting to do so

I have always been interested in the rituals of the catholic church I was an alter boy these are paintings I did of a may procession I was in aged about five 

FRANK AUERBACH summer landscape .He is somebody who craves order and predictability some of his models have sat for him at the same time on the same day for over 40 years .He also has rituals around the display and selling of his work.Order and ritual are about security. His parents died in the holacaust so his desire for security is understandable , I dont know about mine 

Grason Perry the tomb of the unknown craftsman . This is a narrative supported with a lot of fake antiquities.I like this I collect Greek,Roman and Medieval  antiquities my self. Collecting is a form of control, leading to security 

Chapman Brothers "family collection"This is another fake collection ,this time Mc  Donald figures disguised as tribal fetish figures

part of my collection of Greek & Roman antiquities , the objects have no magic significance to me but i do like that they are very old . I arrange and rearrange them in ways that are plea

sing to my eye

The Green Child was written by Herbert Read , he was an architect , it was his only novel . It tells the story of an English engineer who aids a south american country during a war in the mid 19thC . He becomes president of the country but becomes unsettled so fakes his own death and returns to England , to the Cotswold village he grew up in . It hasnt changed in 40 years except that ,  inexplicably,the millstream has reversed its direction of flow . He then relates the story of the Green Child. Two green children appeared in the village many years ago , they were taken in by the miller who was cruel , the boy died the girl lived . She is now an adult  and our hero rescues her from the miller , they live together but after a time she wishes to return to her own folk . Together they follow the millstream up to its source , a pond. They dive in and enter a cave system where her people live . they live together happily in her society but the engineer notices that as people grow older they withdraw from society find themselves a shelf in a niche where they grow cold and  eventually crystalline , I think they are still in  some way aware but free of desire and ambition and the need for society. I like this idea of shedding energy , i think its called ENTROPYand it comes back around to my idea for an ice chapel

1st year art & design project lsad

SCUBA

FLOATING

COLLECTING

  I had a recurring dream as a child that I was going around my home town at night floating horizontally a couple of feet above the pavement . When I took up scuba diving nearly 40 years later it was exactly this sensation . I dont know why I like it so much and i dont know why i like the cold dark waters of the Shannon so much . I have dived with sharks on coral reefs but I prefer the river . I have talked to other divers , risk and danger are certainly important , all divers like this , I personally like finding  things and the associated history , this comes back to my collecting thing.Other divers are interested in the gear, the boats , the fish or whatever but I think all these things are peripheral , central to the appeal of being underwater is the sensuality or the lack of this . you are cosseted in a womb like environment , sight sound and even the sense of touch are all severely compromised . It is a private world, you cant talk and no one can talk to you. Although potentially dangerous you feel secure no one can get at you down there .                    
   Diving , therefore , supplies 2 things important to me, sanctuary and the opportunity to collect old stuff .These are also 2 things I am dealing with in my project.
   The river can also be quite creepy , its always night down there and you never know whats around the next boulder. I like this I love a touch of the Gothic.
    I would like to express the psychological experience of diving as art ,but cant find a way as yet. Photos only give a fraction of the experience and paintings I have done look jokey.I think its going to have to be something involving several senses.

COLLECTING

DARK AND CREEPY

PAINTINGS LOOK A BIT JOKEY

EXPERIMENTING IN MY POOL

1st year art & design project lsad

G.I. Joe

 This is G.I.Joe deep sea diver exploring the deep end of my swimming pool at night. he looks kind of lonely down there all by himself. I intend to come back to this particular space for this project , putting other objects and maybe people down there.

 This is bottle boy, his dad made him wade into rivers with a rake & a bucket that had a glass base so he could peer into the water and use the rake to collect old bottles . Hes a real boy , not me , but if he is still around he will be about my age . Again i'm going to explore collecting ,collections & the rituals surrounding them for this project
                                         this is me

1st year &design project lsad

hi

 I've made my self a death mask .I can join Lenin , George Washington , Micheal Jackson ,James Dean & Ned Kelly ( can you tell who is who ? ) . Well maybe i haven't achieved much as them yet but i do have a great big bag of plaster.
 It is either sobering or reassuring to know that , once dead , everyone, hero or villein , ancient or modern , looks much the same .

1st year art & design project lsad

blog no 9
 today i made a womb out of muslin, cling film, thread and wax . I dont know how womb like it is but it looks quite scary when lit up from inside ! I also made a baby from plasticine.

 Iv also started to make a frozen chapel with ritual object encased in the blocks

1st year art & design project lsad

blog no 8 . this a linocut of a gannets skull i found on the seabed ,30 meters deep while diving on the wreck of a first world war German submarine . All the crew are still inside , they were minelaying outside Cork harbour when one of their own mines exploded. They were all drowned , they got a hatch open but no one got out . Its a dark ,dangerous and sinister place down there and i thought the little skull made a suitable momento mori.Once I had it finished I it looked a bit like a broken wreck on the seabed its self , I may try and trt and do a bigger version that sugests a shipwreck.

 The point about relating how the skull was found is that it is now a treasure , it came from a deep dark place , recovered at some personal risk , associated with violent death & great world events . There is something of the grail quest about it. I'm interested in this elevation of mundane objects by their circumstances . Put any object in a velvet lined, box it becomes interesting more so if the box is fancy. The first known piece of art is a pretty stone discovered on a shelf where it couldn't have ended up naturally. Someone who wasn't as yet fully human found it, thought "thats pretty"brought it home where it remained till discovered by archeolegists  a million years later.

1st year art & design project lsad

blog no 7
 Or the picture could be full of meaning. The saint is a gay icon like Derek Jarman's Sebastiane , the demon he is slaying is intolerance. The pigs represent the establishment , the rocky road and narrow bridge behind him is the difficult route to the renaissance cathedral, which is a temple of Humanism and tolerance. The trees bare fruits of self respect & confidence to help him on his journey. I still dont know what the moon represents , it was an afterthought . The devils outstretched arm rejects the tolerance offered by the temple of humanism.
 But im not gay so its a bit presumptious to be fighting their battle and this paticular devil of intolerance was slain some time ago . Thats the thing about art , its a licince to lie , its all an illusion anyway, ink on paper. A dog wont recognise a picture of a dog he'll just sniff the paint

1st year arts & design project lsad

blog no 6 . This is a linocut i did today. Although im not in anyway spiritual or religious, i like religious symbolism. I like it because  it makes pictures look creepy without being too obvious &  reminds me that in the past people lived in a very different and a more scary world .
 This picture is full of symbolism but here its all  meaningless. I dont know what  saint is killing the devil , its a statue i bought because it looked kitsch  and camp.
 The pigs are  just toys. The church is the Duomo in Florence ,there because it was in a lecture we had on the renaissance last week. The little bridge is from a view of Toledo by el Greco I saw yesterday.  The trees are twigs i found down by the river while canoeing .

 the moon is facing backwards because im new to print making , it was ment to face the other way. The only significance of the craters on the moon is that they didnt appear in art till after they were discovered by Gallilao in the mid 17th C. so would not have been seen on a real old woodcut.I only noticed the devils arm outstretched towards the church after i finished , it means nothing.
 I think art should evoke emotions and avoid saying too much , that should be left to books ( or opinionated bloggers !)

1st year arts &design project lsad

blog no 5 .As the 1st year ccs is on the renaissance i have done a wood cut of myself as Albrecht Durer (well i have his hair anyway) . I can paste the prints into any books on the renaissance that i buy they can be like bookplates as seen in books from old private libraries

project1st year art & design lsad

4th blog drew ff13 this morning ,this is my studio and my space for the next while

1st year art &design project lsad 2012

blog3 the lonely boy has created a private world of his own , under his bedroom floorboards.While this shows admirable imagination and technical skill,socially it is a dangerous development , rather furtive and introverted, It doesnt bode well for the future