Tag Archives: Painting

Winding Down in Douglas

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This painting is taken from our Isle of Man trip. The restaurant, Wine Down, is in Douglas. We sat on the front terrace. I took this shot looking into the crowded restaurant. The window catches interior and exterior, myself and M, and others, observing and being observed. It is a bit like a jigsaw puzzle of life. There are too many pieces and not enough time to fit them all together. And we only imagine the picture on the cover of the box to guide us.

Maybe I am overinclined to sit in cafe windows watching the world going by, while  the world watches me. But there’s belonging too, and the thrill of it all. There are consolations in being a part of the crowd. Imagine the stories of the people here, some connecting with the observer, some lost in their own world. You’ll catch whispered narratives in the buzz, a song rising from the din.

I am listening to Bruce Springsteen’s 2020 album, Letter to You. House of a Thousand Guitars is specifically a hymn to live music venues. Broader than that, it celebrates the human urge to meet socially, and the togetherness of places where the music and the people play

So wake and shake off your troubles my friend

We’ll go to where the music never ends

From the stadiums to the small town bars

We’ll light up the house of a thousand guitars

Art at Limerick’s Hunt Museum

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The Hunt Museum Limerick hold their first Open Submissions Exhibition between Friday 5th December 2025 and Saturday 28th February 2026. I am delighted to have been chosen for the exhibition. My painting, Lovers on a Train, is taken from a train trip between Dublin, Cork and Limerick. I noticed the couple sitting across from me were an island unto themselves. Touring Ireland, their purchases spread between them on the table, while they were absorbed in their screens. So, the tableau involves a still life, a classical composition– like Venus and Mars, and a landscape whizzing by beyond the window. The perfect composition for me. I like to capture the moment to make a visual short story in a particular time and space. People together and all alone; in trains, bars, cafes and cars. I enjoy doing it and hope that others enjoy looking at it. I’m looking forward to heading back down to Limerick. By train, of course.

Frank Duff’s: One More for the Road

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I have been slowing down of late on the art front. The pain thing. Slowing down on all fronts, truth be told. Still, I did squeeze out this spark, in the realm of friends and family. The best place to be. As before, the location is Frank Duff’s pub at the top end of Main Street, Bray. It’s last orders at the end of a great night out; drink and conversation flowing. You’ll catch me standing in the mirror. I suppose I could be singing The Parting Glass, although that’s a tad melancholy in the contecxt. 

Songs of love and friendship have tumbled down to us since the time of Thomas Moore. And ever on into the future; here’s hoping. This night in Duff’s was recent, but takes me back to the days o the foreign telegram. So, I tunnel back to the early seventies and Mellow Candle’s only album Swaddling Songs. While the focal, and vocal, point of the group was the sparkling duo of Alison O’Donnell and Clodagh Simonds, this song was written by guitarist Dave Williams. The lyrics are cut from the same cloth though, and sung with gusto by the female leads. There’s a hint of winter and its globe of interior warmth in this verse, evoking that familiarity amongst friends and lovers caught in the moment.

Sell me heat-haze sell me rain sell me wet and dry

I’ll buy all your lazy laughter

Scatter magic to the moon

Reddened cheeks surrounding the fire and

Reflected smiles are cast in brightened eyes

Dunes at Brittas Bay

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Summer is here, and amongst my favourite activities is doing nothing on a beach. Not exactly an activity so. Brittas Bay is a regular haunt. Thanks to good friends, we can spend  a few weeks in a mobile on Wicklow’s wonderful coast. The mobile park is separated from the rising coast by a small river, and from the bay itself by a range of high sand dunes. 

In this painting, we are approaching the beach through the dunes along one of several stepped ways. It’s something of an oasis of isolation and quiet, between the domestic suburbia of the mobile park and the windswept leisure activity of the beach. 

This time I am using oils, which I have not done in a long long time. Since I went to art college in the summer of 77 I have tended towards faster graphic media such as watercolour, gouache and acrylics. One Dublin cityscape and a mountain landscape is all I can recall. So it was a bit of a struggle to begin with, and I was as much absorbed in the physicality of the whole thing, the texture and smell of the materials as I would normally be in the detail and composition of the finished work. There’s something of the wild and unkempt in this and the process. A sensual saturation that takes its own form.

And so the song that suggests itself is rough and ready too. It’s from the summer of 77 which I remember for sandy days with M in Llandudno, Wales and a holiday hut on the beach in Skerries, North Dublin. It kicks off with a to-die-for bass riff. What follows is a young ruffian gorging himself on the visual pleasures of the beach. It’s called Peaches and was the first hit for the Stranglers from their debut album Rattus Norvegicus. You might also know it from the opening credits of the 2000 geezer flick Sexy Beast, where reformed lout, Ray Winstone, soaks up the sun in a villa in Spain. Oh, I can relate to it in all sorts of ways.

Well there goes another one just lying down on the sand dunes

I’d better go take a swim and see if I can cool down a little bit

Coz you and me woman, we got a lotta things on our minds 

Walking on the beaches looking at the peaches!

Night Music at the Harbour Bar

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Bray’s Harbour Bar is a favourite watering hole, and I have posted on it before. Drinking Outside the Harbour Bar was painted in the bright sunshine of a summer’s evening. Here, we are huddled inside the original bar in early November. There’s a music session, with three hombres giving it yards. Ballads and folk in the bar, with rock off in the back lounge. I’m in the snug, in between, swaying from one to the other.

This was originally the Harbourmaster’s cottage when built in 1831. The harbour itself was only a small dock then, the full harbour arriving in the 1890s. The bar has been licensed since the 1860s or so. The O’Toole Bros ran the show until ten years ago when the Duggan family added it to their fleet. Throughout its century and a half, it has kept its traditional vibe; seafarin’, rough hewn, crammed with bric a brac and all the ancient, and tyro, mariners adrift on the sea of life. It’s cosy in winter, with the log fires lit and the mellow glow of lights in the timbered shadows. And the music starts to play.

Tonight, I might get loaded

On a bottle of wine, on a bottle of wine,

Gonna feel alright, gonna feel alright,

Yeah, I feel alright!

I Got Loaded is a song for the good times. Listen to Los Lobos howling. Spanish for ‘the wolves’, the band formed in East LA in the mid seventies. Their second album, How Will the Wolf Survive, appeared in 1984 and includes this track. It was written by Camille Bob, and was first released in 1965 by his band L’il Bob and the Lollipops.

The Birdhouse

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Imagination sets in, pretty soon I’m singing

Doo, doo, doo, lookin’ out my back door.

The last resort of the artist, when inspiration is slow, take a look out the window. This is an easy one and I should know it well. This is our back garden for thirty years, though shorter now and more verdant than ever. The birdhouse and shed stretch along the back wall, overhung by trees, embraced by exuberant clematis and fronted by an explosion of flowers in summer. Here it’s caught in between seasons, in a monochrome fantasy. My muse suggested leaving it as is and so I present it thus. Perhaps when summer comes (it won’t be long till summer comes) I will launch in to a colour version. Meanwhile … 

Giant doin’ cartwheels, statue wearin’ high heels

Look at all the happy creatures dancin’ on the lawn

Bother me tomorrow, today I’ll buy no sorrow

Doo, doo, doo, lookin’ out my back door.