"Untitled(Pool)" Painting

McArdle is a meticulous craftsman, using traditional glazing techniques, which means a painting can take months to finish.
His work is an exploration of his own psyche, society and his ideas on art. The symbolism is arrived at intuitively and, although composed of seemingly everyday figures (or sometimes public ones) the result is a riddle that needs to be worked at. This is a deliberate suggestiveness or provocation.
In recent years I have become increasingly concerned with the heterogeneous nature of our daily encounters with images — and with the oblique connections that quietly bind them together. In these paintings, I bring together multiple layers of visual experience: glimpses snatched from mediated spaces, fragments lingering from cinema screens, echoes of paintings seen in museums, or carefully composed moments imagined and built up within the canvas itself. Like the flâneur wandering through the city, never following a straight path but drifting between impressions, I do not present a single fixed view; instead I allow images to brush against one another, creating spaces where hidden relationships emerge. The collision and interplay of these elements within the painting provides a way for me to examine how our psychological viewpoints are formed — shaped not just by what we see directly, but by those sideways, glancing encounters that reveal our position within society and culture. The significance of my work lies in this continuing attempt to ground visual experience in a broader understanding of how we inhabit the world, rather than only within traditional art historical aesthetics — an approach that turns the act of looking itself into a kind of wandering, and the painting itself into a place where oblique connections become visible.