Dilemma as I decided art work for gallery wall
AS a rule I’m not normally shy about sharing my work with the world, let’s face it, you cannot be a shrinking violet in the creative world, whether it be writing, singing or painting it is heart on sleeve time.
However with the latter I’m probably more reticent than with the other two, and that’s because I know there are many, many artists who are better than me. With this in mind, I was in a bit of a dilemma this week when I hung four works by the uber-talented Irish artist Cormac O’Leary. You see there was a space on the wall for one more large canvas, and my European bison, depicted in the wilds of the Bialowieska forest in Eastern Poland, just filled that gap - with the added advantage that the overall colour of the painting matched the ‘willow’ colour I had chosen for the wall.
Of course visitors to the gallery will be the judges, but on the subject of colour planning it is definitely a ‘thing’, and I am not on my own in the art world when it comes to this. For example, one patron of the Laughing Badger bought a painting because the red of one of my foxes ‘picked out’ the red in her curtains.
From a business perspective one needs to be philosophical on these matters, a sale is a sale and all that, but truth be known, one would rather a buyer talk about my fox cutting a vibrant dash across the work instead of old Reynard fitting in well with her fixtures and fittings. In consolation, as I sit in my garret,I am in good company and my favourite story in this vein involves an art dealer at the turn of the 20th century who had the temerity to commission Matisse to paint four large canvasses with lots of blue and yellow in them, to go with the Gauguins he had in his dining room. Oh for a seat at that table.
Cormac’s work lifts me up by the scruff of the neck and slaps me around the chops each morning as I watch the early morning light dance slowly across his oils like someone lazily tracing a flashlight across the confident strokes of his palette knife.
It is a wonderful world I live in, and mornings are my special time with coffee in hand, sitting in a different chair with a new view each day. Cormac’s work makes that magical leap between indoor and out, bridging the gap between the imagined and reality with a seemingly effortless sleight of hand, maybe even artifice, as Molly’s rolling fields spill into O’Leary’s mythic forests and stark shores and back again with ease. I’m happy here.
There is more of a connection between my work and Cormac’s than at first meets the eye, the colour is incidental for sure, because both his young bull and my 900 pound bison stand at the edge of the dark wood, they are edglings on the brink of open ground and dense cover, they are shy and they are bold, they are everything you want them to be and more.
On a lighter note, and a welcome to my mad world, the story of how Cormac’s paintings came to be in Padfield is more of a smash and grab whodunnit than a Brink’s -Mat robbery, but nevertheless would have made a great scene in a Carry On film. To explain; as myself, Joanie and her three daughters headed back to Dublin and the ferry home I pointed at the road to Mullingar and said, “My mate Dave O’Shea’s Chimera Gallery is in Mullingar.”Joanie said: “Shall we call in?” “Go on then,” says I, as we took off on a little detour.
“Amigo!” Dave shouted, very surprised to see us, and after a couple of man hugs and a quick drool over his earthly delights, Dave said: “Why don’t you take some of Cormac’s paintings back with you?” Obviously I bit his hand off right up to the elbow and 10 minutes after we arrived, Joanie and I walked down Mullingar high street with the work tucked under our arms, although it has to be said that Joanie was not best pleased as she tried to juggle my coffee, three girls and a valuable seascape along a crowded and bustling market town in the middle of Ireland on a Saturday afternoon.
Come and see the beasts on Friday (Sept 14) from 6pm at the gallery. There will be scones, beer and more tall tales.