American Spirit Painting

Gareth is an Irish artist living and working in Austin, Texas. He is primarily known for his unique, figurative paintings and prints featuring fragmented portraits and insurgent imagery from his life (past and present.) he recontextualizes works of old masters such as Da Vinci, employing esthetics that echo Jean michel Basquiat, Jean Dubuffet and Picasso. Gareth's art focuses on suggestive dichotomies such as freedom versus occupation, sovereignty versus subservience, war versus peace, love versus hate, Catholicism versus protestantism and religion versus irreligion. Balancing abstraction with figuration, his social commentary is at time simple and humorous and other times insightful and provocative. He mixes stainless steel with canvas, steel bars with wood and applies oil bar, acrylic and spray paint to just about any useable surface. His paintings are punctuated by doodles and phrases from his daughters, along with images and poetry from many of his favorite painters and writers. His life in Northern Ireland, England, France, New York, Los Angeles and Texas has given him a perspective rendered in contradictions - colorful yet blacker than black, unique yet familiar, a unification of the obscure and the obvious.