Anselm Kiefer , Scuba diving in the river versuses the Red Sea and Mike canning

Mike Canning said Art is unlike a good joke in that good art improves with each viewing where as a joke looses it impact after the first telling . It set me thinking , I dive in the river every few days winter and summer no matter how cold ,how fast the current is or how poor the visability is . sometimes the place is so dark you cant see half a meter in front of you and you have to hold your buddies hand to stay in touch. Yet i find it endlessly facinating.I've also dived the Red Sea , its wonderfull, millions of brightly coloured fish ,you follow reefs which drop off 2 miles beneath you, you explore wrecks that look like a Holly wood set, Ships sunk during the second world war ,still full of tanks, aeroplanes all the crap of war stacked up but never got there because the ship was sunk, old sailing ships, intact and full of their cargo of wine. at night you can open bottles of wine 150 years old then dive at night amonst the sharks and all the scary things that come out in tropical waters at night but for all that , it 's like Mike Cannings joke , if youv'e seen it once the next day and the next is the same . The visabilty is so good you see it all at one go , no mystery.. Dara Waldren gave a lecture about the romantics and talked about the Subline. He said there is a thing in extreame tourism to be droped by helicopter in a compleatly unexplored part of the world , the idea being to be , literally the first person on earth to be at this spot' All this must take so much time and cost so much but I explore bits of the river ,underwater, that i know no one ever in the whole world has ever seen before. Ive come across skulls of ancient animals, 4000 thousand year old dug out canoes , mysterious deep dark pits full of meter long blood sucking eels with concentric rows of tiny sharp teeth, I know no one has ever seen these things before .This to me is much more fascinating than the bright colours of the red sea and can be done on a weekend morning for free. This brings me to Anselm Kiefer I love his mucky,obscure and sloppy looking pictures. I've tried to express the underwater river artistically but its fasination to me is the lack of any senserory stimulus , you cant hear anything , can see practilly nothing , have no sense of up or down , your almost compleatly sensually deprived and its weird that for an artist i find that so compulively interesting.BUT..Anselm Kiefer seems to be able to capture how the river feels to me

Doctors Rock

No one has ever seen doctors rock from a distance ,standing alone in all its glory and splendid colours. If you could it would be a wonder but you cant. Although it's literally a stones throw from the diamond rocks cafe in Kilkee its almost 100 feet below the water , can only be approached on a low tide ,when the prevailing west wind is'nt blowing. even then a diver has to use experience and excellent compass skills to find it among the laberinth of gullies that make up the underwater topography of kilkee bay. The rock it's self is like a mushroom on a stalk worn smooth by millions of years of small boulders rubbing agianst it. It's about the size of a small office block and ABSOUTLY carpeted with the most vivid jewal anaemoies..I HAVE NO IDEA WHY THEY ARE SO VIVID . Even when the water is at it's clearest you can't see the whole rock , its like comming across a corner of a building in a dense fog , you work you're around and gradually get a sense of the whole. You cant see the ananemoies till you are a meter from them,you cant see their colour s till you shine a tourch on them, in the natural light they are greeny gray . If you take them out of the water the die and loose their colour , if the whole of Docters rock was lifted out of the sea maybe people could see itr,s glory for a few seconds before the anomies died but thats the only way.Irish waters are too murky and using lots of flash wont work , there is to much particulate matter causing scatter.

 So why is it so beautifull?

 Well its not art , the sea bugs arn't self aware , did god just make the world so beautifull that even the bits we dont or even cant see are gems , i really dont know but Docters rock has allways puzzled me

my photos of dr's rock

my painting of dr's rock