My Art is up for Auction at Nora Dunne Gallery Oct 4th

One of my recent paintings has been accepted into the Auction which Gormleys Fine Art are holding in the Nora Dunne Gallery on October 4th. Gormleys Fine Art have an online auction site which is showing all the paintings and you can bid on them in the days prior to the auction. Here is my painting, Howth Head from Portmarnock. Gormleys is a well established gallery chain, having two galleries in the north of Ireland and one in Dublin. They are renting the Auction Showroom from the Nora Dunne Gallery/Auctionhouse.

Croagh Patrick -- Paintings of Ireland

Croagh Patrick -- Finished Painting.

First step, I drew out the image, using a small paint brush and raw umber paint. Next step, I put in a sky of cerulean blue and white using large brushes. I can refine this later using smaller brushes, but for now it is fine. I mixed a variety of off-greens and semi-neutrals using ultramarine blue, cadmium yellow, and permanent mauve with lemon yellow. I also created dark browns using orange and ultramarine blue. I didn't use greens straight from the tube as I can vary the green colours easily by varying the proportions of the mixes. It makes for more varied colours, if I need them.
I created light grays in a bit of an unusual way but it worked out nicely. I mixed viridian green with permanent rose. I got a dark almost purple black and I used this on outlining the rocks. I mixed white with this to get a light gray for the side of the mountain. I didn't use any black in the painting. I might have used a little paynes grey in extreme dark areas.

Continuing on the rocks using the white grey colours.
It may look like there isn't so much happening at this stage but I have been working on the rocks to make them appear more natural and graduate the shadows from dark to lighter as they get further away. Also I have begun to green up the mountain using my ultramarine blue with cadmium yellow mix.

A lot of refining is going on at this stage - I have worked on smoothing out the sky brushstrokes and I have been going over the whole picture with alterations here and there to create a balanced look. What I actually do is a kind of instinctive thing, so difficult to describe, but it's mostly tweaking of colours and tones to make the sense of distance more apparent. Finally I put in the figures and signed the painting. The finished image is up the top of this post. Enjoy!

Past work -- Dust Stained Posse.

Today I am posting a painting I completed in 1996. I still think it's one of the best I've done. It has one drawback...the idea is not mine.
It was painted freehand by me from a picture reproduced in a book of the work of Frank McCarthy, an American artist. He painted such scenes and unfortunately died in 2002. This painting is on canvas 24" x 20" and I gave it as a gift to my sister and her husband. Frank's original, I am sure would be very expensive to buy, and this is almost an identical copy. He made limited edition prints of his version and they are all sold out. I am showing it here, as an example of the standard of work which really I should be getting towards more consistently, given time. The style here is not as loose as some of my more recent work, and I might try to veer back towards this somewhat. I really like the way this painting turned out, and it proved to me at the time that I could paint really well if I took the time. This painting took me five times the time it takes me to paint my 12"x16" paintings -- but I think I could be faster at painting it now. It also reinforces my belief that I should be aiming for quality as much as possible. No shortcuts!! Anyway it's here for you to enjoy, and hopefully I will paint something original soon which is equally as good! As they say...Watch this space!
In the next day or so I will post shots of what I have been painting over the last two weeks. So check back and see.