Brian McMahon - Real Hallucinations

On nearly the last day of the Brian McMahon retrospective I wandered down the delightfully named O'Curry Street in Limerick and saw one of the best shows I have seen in a long time.  Spontaneity, decreptitude, thick paint as rugged and textured as the unplastered walls that held the paintings, the building full of life and colour and resounding with exclamations and cries from visitors who recognised themselves or others in the vibrant, splashy, slashy portraits that hung on every wall.   This was a real local's exhibition but wouldn't have looked out of place in Dublin.  Still, why should they get all the best shows?

There are two good write-ups of the exhibition here and here and below are my own photographs of these stunning works.

The show was held in the Sailor's Home (above), a magnificent building that will hopefully come back to life as a cultural venue after this successful outing.

Catch-up

I have been working and visiting exhibtions and generally being a Good Little Artist but just not blogging about it.  So here's a bit of a catch up.

No. 1 - RDS Success!
These prints were selected for exhibition at the RDS Student Awards 2014

Degree Show,  June 2014

You can't see much there I know but really you have to see them in the paper as it were, which is why I think they were chosen as for the RDS you send the actual work  They are mainly black but have thread embossed into them with the digital image behind.  The images below show what I mean.

Hybrid Print, Pre-spinning

Detail of hybrid print

There is a prize-giving ceremony on July 30 at which I hope to WIN MONEY.

2.  Hospital Shop Window Festival
I should really do a separate post on this but I am part of a group organising a festival for Culture Night and beyond showcasing the art of Irish and possibly international artists in the shop windows of Hospital, where I live.  Here is the website  www.hswf.weebly.com
and here is one of the fabulous images I took for it.  I love reflections.

3.   A new studio - in Dungarvan
We are moving to the sunny South-East - when we find a house we like.  I have already procured a studio space which I am itching to use.  I think studios are like a new pair of shoes or nail varnish - you imagine that the work you will create there will be so much better because everything is new.  The truth of this remains to be seen but I am determined that this studio will not be cluttered with several projects on the desk at the same time.

4.  New Work
I made these collages for Nom Nom Cafe in Kenmare.  They are part of a project I am tentatively calling Vogueifications which use images from Vogue fashion shoots.  For reasons peculiar to me Vogue fashion images delight and dismay me in equal measure.  I think they are the best fashion imagery in the world but the stupid captions they give them winds me up and demeans the models and readers alike.  So I attack them with paint, tape or re-draw them, incorporating the offending captions.

Abandonment

I have abandonment issues.  I love it so much it makes me go where I shouldn't.

Time to slap a bit of life

into this blog. 

Here is my degree show work, installed, ready for the viewing public.  I had a wonderful four years to get to this and came out a different person altogether.  I am looking forward to being an artist in the real world now, however delightful and difficult that may be.

3D prints

 I scanned in a box that was used for earplugs and inkjet printed it over a monoprint. This gave me the idea to make some large size 3D earplug boxes which I did.  Some were made from prints, and one was simply the packaging blown up, printed and reassembled.

 

 

The End of Days

I am here, in the lull before the degree show when everything is so quiet that I am wondering what I have forgotten to do.  Here are some images of the degree show set up and things before, when everything was just a blur of assessments and presentations and clearing spaces and painting.

 

Etching part 2

I had to reground my plates after all and still got foul bite but printed them anyway.