Painting "Gulliver in Brobdingnag"

I am delighted to be heading to Cavan for a portraiture workshop this weekend. I'm looking forward to seeing some old friends and a couple of my paintings illustrating Gulliver's Travels that hang in the Johnston Central Library there.

The picture at top shows "Gulliver in Lilliput" and this video shows how I created Gulliver in Brobdingnag.
The lovely soundtrack is by Neil Martin and the West Ocean String Quartet.

Two New Stamps: The Happy Prince and Gulliver’s Travels

An Post, the Irish Postal Service recently asked me to design a pair of stamps based on some of my best known work for the Europa series, whose theme this year is classic Children’s Books.
I revisited and reworked illustrations I had done for "The Happy Prince" by Oscar Wilde and "Gulliver’s Travels" by Jonathan Swift.
The stamps and first day cover have just been published and I'm really pleased with them.
I look forward to travelling to Cavan someday to stick the 2 inch Gulliver stamp on the wall beside the 8 foot tall original painting.

Hammershøi's Chair

When I dug out my oil paints to paint the Gulliver panels, I really fell in love with the process again.
The smell and the viscosity of the paints, the effects that can be achieved with them, and also the need to work on a much larger scale, all seemed to point up areas where I was frustrated with my watercolour painting.
I started to work on easel paintings as a kind of a relief from the illustration work I was doing, and I chose simple non narrative subjects so that the only things I had to worry about, were the arrangement of the shapes on the canvas, and the tones and the colours.
I'm not about to embrace the undoubted joys of abstract painting just yet, but whilst my instinct always moves towards the representational with at least hint of a narrative, this picture is really about my playing with close harmonies in colour within a framework of very formal shapes.
In that respect, this piece reminds me more than a little of the work of Sean Scully or Piet Mondrian.( There's a couple of names you wouldn't expect to see on my blog)
In fact the artist whose influence shows most in this work is probably Vilhelm Hammershøi .

Sleeping nude

Here's a large drawing that I sold in last year's life drawing exhibition.

It was about four foot wide as I remember.

I've been drawing and painting small pictures for years and years, but now at last I seem to have realised the importance and impressiveness of working on a large scale, probably as a result of the Gulliver murals I did in 2006.

Of course when you are working towards reproduction in a book, this is hardly relevant, but over the years I have exhibited more and more, and the size of the picture is very important here, not least when it comes to pricing a work. 

There is also a great feeling of achievement when you create a big piece of work.