Early Spring (Trees #11) Painting

I've always been an artist. It was my refuge through an unhappy adolescence, and my passion in the decades since. Mainly I've worked in performance - acting, directing, improvising, teaching. Often my work was wild, experimental, transgressive. It took me all over the world, to many different communities and audiences. A combination of ill-health and the pandemic caused me to pause. Did I want to resume a hectic schedule of travel and collaboration? The answer, clearly, was 'no'. Always I had, when possible, painted and composed music. It was time to focus more on those quieter creativities, less on the public work of making performance. I realised something else. However wild my performance work had been, there was a core of quietness in it. I'd often felt the deepest meaning of performance - in music, dance or theatre - was the shared moment of silence that happens at the end, when everyone, audience and artists, share a moment of arrival. Connection and temporary community. Movement defines stillness. Sound defines silence. So it is in my painting. I look for the simplest possible way to shape empty space and create resonance. I seldom paint with anything other than black or red water-based inks. Sometimes I use an acrylic red when I want a colour to vibrate. I paint within a limited series of subjects: 'Trees'; 'The Monk'; 'The Pilgrim': 'Ratdog & Boy'. My work is influenced by Japanese techniques and aesthetics, but I make no claim to represent that style. The limitations of material and subject matter open deep possibilities to find the calm I've always looked for in art. I paint, inspired by nature, in my tumble-down house on the Fanad Peninsula, on the edge of the Atlantic, in rural Ireland. My deepest hope is that each painting encourages you to pause for a moment, come into this present moment, and hear the passionate silence of now. I hope it brings you a gentle calm.