"Holy Water" Painting

This series of paintings is the result of a collaboration with a writer which led to the publication of a collection of poems called "Lonely Destiny" published by Deirdre McGarry, a writer & Poet, had written a collection of poems in response to a series of paintings of the Stations of the Cross by a contemporary German painter. She was wanting to publish the poems with these paintings as illustrations but wasn't able to get permission to do that. So she asked me if I would be interested in doing some illustrations for the book. When I read the poems I was struck by the intense dramatic nature of the work and was keen to get involved in the project. I decided not to look at the pictures that had inspired Deirdre in the first place. I wanted the work I did to be my response to her poems, just as the poems were her response to the original pictures-like links in a chain. The religious subject matter and the emphasis on drama made me think of the work of Giotto, which often focuses on a dramatic moment in the story, and seemed to have the same kind of intensity.