Reflections

This is a charcoal sketch I was working on based on some jewellery made by the Berber’s. It is called ‘Desert Moon’. I like to draw as a way of relaxing when I am stuck with an oil painting. There is something more intuitive and organic (for me) with the building of a drawing.

This is the start of a practise piece based on ‘Lady with an Ermine’ or alternatively ‘woman with a weasel’ or ‘Femme fatale with a ferret’! I worked up the base in Burnt Sienna, changed to Burnt Umber, but decided I missed the warm tones of the Sienna, so I worked that back in for the finished result.

This was the finished piece, all framed up in its new home!

I have since worked on a couple of other master copy pictures thanks to Adrian Cooke who runs online courses from his studios in Waterford. You can find him at: https://adriancooke.ie/art/

It is called: ‘Jeune homme nu assis au bord de la mer’ by Hippolyte Flandrin

My second image was based on: Marie Magdalene in the Cave' by Jules Lefebvre. In my opinion this is more like Lilith than Mary Magdalene, but in those days the reasoning only had to be paper thin!

So, the last couple of years have flown by and the Spring is once more upon its way. This is another of Melanie’s wonderful pictures of the sunrise at the Spring Equinox… the promise of longer days.

I have been working on a variety of work since I last updated the page so I will add that material soon. Apologies for the short period of silence! All the best, Wolf

2021 flew by in a wave of restrictions and finally as we enter 2022, we are coming back out into the world: Planning exhibitions and classes and new projects!

I had a lovely chat with Eimear Burke, who is the head of the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids. This wonderful organisation (of which I have been a member for almost a decade) introduces itself thus:

Druidry is a vital and dynamic nature spirituality that is flourishing all over the world. It unites our love of the earth with our love of creativity and the arts.

Flowing through all the exciting new developments in modern druidism is the power of an ancient tradition: the love of land, sea and sky – the love of the earth our home.

So it was particularly wonderful to be asked by Eimear to talk about my art and its spiritual influences. I hope you enjoy it!

Well, 2020 has been a strange year so far. But as the Loughrea Medieval Festival was not able to take place, many of the contributors were invited to take part in an online live event.

I was very pleased to be asked Marie Mannion, and Garry Kelly from GK Media did the hard job of organising an artist! Garry was fantastic to work with and I would highly recommend GK Media as I was able to relax and enjoy the process.

Buildings are not my usual thing, but I hope you enjoy the video and I hope to follow it up with more in the future.

Well, 2020 has been a very strange year. As a tutor, I was working all the way through lockdown - busier than ever! However, it has given me time in the evenings to work on the colour illustrations that I am producing. I am halfway through so hope to complete this work by the end of the year - Ceridwen (previous post) included.

Well, my black & white illustrations are all finished and so this summer I will be completing the colour on all 22 of them. sorry for the delay in publishing!

Of the many paintings I have completed during the last few years, ‘The Selkie’ was my favourite. The idea for this painting came from the tales of the Seal People who would shed their seal skins and sing, dance and make love under the moon on the beeches at night.

But in this painting the viewer is both the man and the woman. Our mundane self sleeps on, while our true self is awakened by the moon and the kindred spirits silhouetted upon the rocks outside the window. The only colour is in the night sky that the moon rides through, enticing us to wake, despite the hour, and to go out under the stars and truly live in the moment.

I love the written word as a way of hearing the wisdom from people long gone into the mists, but Goethe's words do show a clear understanding of the feeling of sacredness, from within which drawing emerges: " We talk...far too much. We should talk less and draw more. I personally should like to renounce speech altogether  and, like organic Nature, communicate everything I have to say in sketches. That fig tree, this little snake, the cocoon on my windowsill quietly awaiting its future - all these are momentous signatures. A person able to decipher their meaning properly would soon be able to dispense with the written or the spoken word altogether. The more I think of it, there is something futile, mediocre, even (I am tempted to say) foppish about speech. By contrast, how the gravity of Nature and her silence startle you, when you stand face to face with her, undistracted, before a barren ridge or in the desolation of the ancient hills."[1] Goethe

To boldly go...  5th November 2017

      Well, it has been an exciting year with so many shows and some great reactions to the work. The problem, as an artist, is that by the time anyone sees the work, I often feel I have reached the end of a six month relationship with it! We know each others faults and have shared many a conversation of ideas during the creation process. It becomes very hard when someone then asks you to sum up 'what's it all about'? Especially if the final image appears simple, as the process of becoming, is far from that.

    Today it seems difficult to find meaning amongst the 'weapons of mass distraction' and the social media technique of skimming the surface endlessly leads to a fatal lack of depth in my opinion. It becomes hard to hold a deep conversation with someone who can't turn off their mobile. Aldous Huxley put it well: " -  the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." ..." The other world of religion is different from the other world of entertainment; but they resemble one another in being most decidedly "not of this world." Both are distractions and, if lived in too continuously, both can become, in Marx's phrase "the opium of the people" and so a threat to freedom. Only the vigilant can maintain their liberties, and only those who are constantly and intelligently on the spot can hope to govern themselves effectively by democratic procedures. A society, most of whose members spend a great part of their time, not on the spot, not here and now and in their calculable future, but somewhere else" " ...will find it hard to resist the encroachments of those who would manipulate and control it.”

   Anyway, this is a rather convoluted way of saying that I finish 2017 with a solo show at the Christchurch Gallery in Limerick (51a O'Connell street), and am really excited about the work I will be embarking on over the winter! It will form a new gallery and a deeper approach. I am determined to build the level of quality in my work and will be drawing a greater symbolism into the new pieces.   ...watch this space, and thanks for a great 2017!

The origins of metamorphic Art - 28th July 2017

Research carried out many years ago by Dr Christopher Chippendale

( Cambridge University's museum of archaeology and anthropology) and Dr Paul Tacon ( the Australian Museum in Sydney) - involved surveys of rock art painted on cliffs in northern Australia, on ledges in South Africa and inside caverns in France and Spain. These are the world's principal prehistoric art sites. Their findings were interesting.

'We looked at art that goes back to the dawn of humanity and found it had one common feature: animal-human hybrids,' said Dr Christopher Chippindale, '... These composite beings, from a world between humans and animals, are a common theme from the beginning of painting.' Importantly, representational art has its roots in the origins of man; our thoughts may have been abstract, but our art was expressive in real terms.

I draw and paint figures of myth or metamorphosis because, to paraphrase Sir Terry Pratchett in Hogfather, I am fascinated by the point at which 'the falling angel meets the rising ape' within us.

A wider awareness - 6th May 2017

Many people ask me why I am so interested in myths. These ancient tales that have been told and retold over the centuries... what relevance could they hold for us today?

It seems to me that myths are often the glue that holds our entire existence together: We create a myth from our life story as we recount events over the years. Many people base their system of ethics on myths and religious tales from centuries ago. And yet, others discount such tales as irrelevant.

In 1953, Paul C. Aebersold (Stanford University & University of California, Berkeley) commented on the fact that 98% of all the atoms in a persons body are replaced every year. After 5 years, every atom has been replaced. This means that there is no physical part of you that existed more than five years ago. So who was it, that experienced the memories you hold from when you were a child?

The one continual thread that binds the tale of your life is the myth created from your memories that is passed on, year after year, from the old atoms to the new.

Myths reflect the patterns of life that have existed for millennia. They are information carriers passed on as a gift from our ancestors. People who may not have known or understood the world in which we find ourselves, but all the same, they pass on this wisdom to see the world anew in every generation.

It often seems that old tales have little in common with our modern world. But it is important not to loose our connection to the ecosystem that still sustains us. In his book Straw Dogs, John Gray makes the following observation:   "The senses of plants are sophisticated; some can detect the lightest touch (better than the activity of human fingertips), and they all have a sense of vision. The oldest and simplest microbial life forms have senses that resemble those of humans. Halobacteria date back to the beginnings of life on Earth. They are organisms which can detect and respond to light by virtue of a compound called rhodopsin - the same compound , present as a pigment in the human eyes, that enables us to see. We look at the world through eyes of ancient mud." p59

Pigment, is a tool that enables us to see, paint and draw reality into existence, and our tales pass this wonderful expression of creativity on to others in a fable, a saga, a story, or indeed, a myth.