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.

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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.

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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

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Drawings from the Moulin Eoux

We (my partner and I) are very lucky to get to stay with some friends who have a farm in France. Here are some drawings from our time there…more coming soon

 

Performance Art in Dublin

Fergus Byrne Performance Art Kilmainham 2010 (Photo by James Moore)

Performance Art Kilmainham Dublin 2010 (Photo by James Moore)

Performance Art Kilmainham Dublin 2010 (Photo by James Moore)

Performance Art Kilmainham Dublin 2010 (Photo by James Moore)

Performance Art Kilmainham Dublin 2010 (Photo by James Moore)

Performance Art Kilmainham Dublin 2010 (Photo by James Moore)

Nigel Rolfe Performance Art Kilmainham Dublin 2010 (Photo by James Moore)

Performance Art Kilmainham Dublin 2010 (Photo by James Moore)

Helena Walsh performance Art 2009/2010 Block T Smithfield Dublin (Photo by James Moore)

A small selection of photographs taken a few years back at Performance Art Live Presents ‘Right Here, Right Now’ at Kilmainham Gaol, Dublin featuring Fergus Byrne and Helena Walsh  (Please note photo here is from Helena Walsh’s Block T performance of Invisible Stains. Anyone interested in more photos from these performances please email me via contact page)