Conor Walton: Pessimism, Painting and the Incandescent Spark

Following my review of ‘Glow’ at the Catherine Hammond, I caught up with one of the artists, Conor Walton, via social media. We began a conversation which grew into the following fascinating dialogue – James Waller     JW: I wrote in the review of ‘Glow’ about what I perceived as a humorous aspect in your…

Mark Beatty: An Open Envelope and a Blaze of Ornament

If you missed Mark Beatty’s recent exhibition at the Clonakilty Community Art Centre, then you missed an absolute gem. Beatty’s work has a rare, living vibration: raw yet refined, open-ended, yet delineated, infinitesimal yet whole, genuine yet subtly ironic. Stepping into the gallery I immediately felt a quiver of visual delight, an instantaneous flood of…

Hymns of Steel: The Art of Moss Gaynor

A band of stainless steel is wrapped tightly, like a fist, around a shaft of burnt larch, the ‘body’ from which the steel band comes, a semi-circular disc of the same, finely incised, drilled and cut – three segments of burnt larch sit snugly within the disc, juxtaposing starkly against the bright metal. Its title…

The Delicate Edge: The Panoramas of Michael McSwiney

Bands of melancholy blue bleed across and down; soft and sudden rivulets of oil find their secret, yet random way. One feels nature being disclosed to it-self, the paint breathing with delicate, subconscious power. A build up of dark paint crud, coarsened with various ground substances acts as a permeable wall, both allowing and disallowing…

SEA CHANGE: Sculpture by Moss Gaynor

Moss Gaynor is a Clonakilty-based sculptor who works primarily with the medium of steel, which he blends with a variety of other non-ferrous materials such as limestone, hardwood and found stone.  He is responsible for such impressive local public works as the soaring surfboard on Inchydoney beach (a true modern megalith if ever there was…