Drawing on the City

Grand Canal Basin

I grew up in an older Dublin which is now fast disappearing and being replaced with block after block of glass, steel and concrete. Some parts of the new city are better than others, like the newly build Brew Dog building at the end of the quays near the Dublin Docklands and Grand Canal Basin.

 

 

Grand Canal Basin

Interior of Brewdog and the View across the river Liffey to the new Central Bank building

 

 

 

Some watercolour painting and drawing from the Inisheer Féile na gCloch drawing workshop 2019

It was nice to be invited back to host the drawing on location sketch outs again this year. We were lucky with the weather staying dry for the most part. I did fall off my bike and sprain my wrist which wasn’t so nice, luckily for me it was the left wrist rather than my drawing hand.

 

Boat on Inisheer

Boat on Inisheer 2

Aran Landscape

Oh Fence De Fense – A response…

Oh Fence De Fence

Oh Fence De Fence was a direct response to the Finnegans Woke exhibition in Rua Red in Tallaght, that came out of several conversations between Dirk Hudson and James Moore.

Oh Fence De Fence refers to the duality of fences; particularly in a geo political context. Depending on your viewpoint a fence can be a defensive or offensive structure.

The fence is also a metaphor for the barriers erected in our minds that prevent us taking action, seeing the world in a different way, empathising with others, taking sides or sitting on the fence.

Franko B – Spare some change please

15th – 17th November 2017

Eleven artists spent a physically and mentally intense but rewarding three days at a series of workshops with performance artist Franko B at Rua Red in Tallaght, Co. Dublin. Part of the programme was to create a performance piece in a defined area of approximately 1 square yard. Over a two hour period I sat cross legged in a hoodie pretending to be homeless. As people passed by I asked them for money. I was successful in my deception and managed to collect €10.80. This exact same amount then went towards a homeless charity via an online credit card transaction.

The Inisheer Zibaldone

This year JesseJames spent the entire month of August as artists in residence on Inis Oírr.
We created the Inisheer Zibaldone a handmade artists notebook recording our experiences on the Aran island. We welcomed contributions from many sources both on the island as well as from as far afield as America and Brazil. For more information about the project please check out the link http://www.inisheerzibaldone.com

There is a touch of the artist about Old Bloom

Here are a couple of images from a group exhibition I was involved in which was based on a four day sketching event related to places around the north side of the city.
All of the works are connected in some way to Ulysses and are currently on display at the Olivier Cornet gallery.

Since the exhibition opening I have begun to work up a more stylized image based on the Sirens episode of Ulysses which I started drawing while we were situated opposite the Ormonde hotel where the action in the book takes place.There is a black and white line drawing version of the same image in the exhibition.

I have coloured this one on the computer but I will eventually do a painted version. Likewise with the Duglacz butcher’s scene, where Bloom goes to buy a kidney for his breakfast.

The third image shows my notebook in the background, the Buddha depicted is now in Collin’s Barracks and is mentioned in Ulysses. The photograph  is linked from the gallery facebook page.

Dublin Plein Air Festival 18th – 24th June

Thanks to Paul D’Arcy and everyone involved in the 1st Dublin Plein Air Festival. It was fun to participate despite being rusty, thankfully the weather was glorious which makes life so much easier for the plein air painter. Here is an acrylic from the event, a small canvas of Lambay island from the Rush coastline 30 x 24cm.

Save

Save

Drawings by Robots

I made this short video after another visit to the Science Gallery in Dublin. Despite the advancement of technologies, drawing from life, is still a challenge for these robots. There is a mechanical stiffness to the finished results. For now we  humans can still draw and paint better than a robot can.

Blighted by Kenning

Forbidden Fruit painting by James F. Moore after the Charlotte Jervis installation Blighted by Kenning

A couple of years ago I was at the excellent Science Gallery in Dublin and came across a work related to GM foods (an apple apparently floating in space) by the artist Charlotte Jervis. “Blighted by Kenning centres on bioengineered bacteria that has The Universal Declaration of Human Rights encoded into its DNA. The DNA was extracted from the bacteria and used to ‘contaminate’ apples grown at The Hague, the seat of the International Courts of Justice. These ‘forbidden fruits’ were then sent to genomics laboratories around the world. Participating scientists were asked to sequence the DNA, find the message hidden within and send back a translation. They were also invited to eat the fruit.”
https://dublin.sciencegallery.com/growyourown/blightedkenning

As a literal and metaphorical comment on GM technology and the ambivalent idea of ‘forbidden fruits’ it is brilliant.

Save

Zibaldone

When it comes to artistic notebooks, Da Vinci is the obvious go to guy. He used secret notebooks to record a lifetime of enquiry. From his exquisite studies of the human body to the movement of vortices in water, maps and inventions, as well as imaginative flights of fancy, he drew or wrote it all down in his notebooks.

Like most people who keep a Zibaldone*, or an artist’s notebook, I would imagine that Da Vinci probably valued his at least as much as his finished paintings.
I see this blog as a kind of Zibaldone, a hodge podge of words and images posted online, but as well as drawings and text, there are photographs, video and sound.

*Zibaldone
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A zibaldone is an Italian vernacular commonplace book. The word means “a heap of things” or “miscellany” in Italian. The earliest such books were kept by Venetian merchants in the fourteenth century, taking the form of a small or medium-format paper codex.

The word may also refer specifically to the best-known such book: the Zibaldone di pensieri by Giacomo Leopardi, often called simply The Zibaldone.

1.a book containing multiple writings collected in a scattered fashion  [quotations ▼]
2.the notebook by Leopardi that became a generic name for a collection of loosely connected thoughts.
3.a confusing mixture of diverse things or people
4.hodgepodge
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/zibaldone

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save