I regard myself as an emerging artist. I am simply, like a drugged butterfly, emerging in slow motion. In my twenties I lived for a while in Venezuela and was heavily influenced by rural folk art. Other influences include the Rothko Chapel, Frida Kahlo, Egyptian funerary portraits, Holy well decorations, African barbershop signs, religious icons, surf T-shirts, old football cards, crap signs and those blue photos you get in old shop windows. A lot of my work involves fruitless searches for things that are lost, be they people, underground rivers, stories, buildings or ways of life. Regular motifs include the connecting and merging of maps, old photographs and whiskey-based visions.
I work as a political cartoonist for The New European newspaper and football cartoonist for When Saturday Comes magazine. I’ve had four heavily illustrated memoiry travel books published, the last of which – A London Country Diary – featured many of the same themes as this exhibition, including a series of nature sketches called Plants I Don’t Know the Name Of.
I move with my family between North London and Co. Clare in Ireland, depending on weather patterns and how my trees are doing. (i.e., school holidays)
(Here is the artist relaxing above a pub in Ennistymon, the morning after preview night)