'Why don't you paint horizons?' poet Derek Mahon (1941-2020) asked me in 2014 in response to my early abstract paintings. A collaboration began where a poem and text about horizons were written (by Derek and published as part of the collections 'Olympia and The Internet' 2017 and 'Against The Clock' 2018 with The Gallery Press). I started a series of paintings: Horizons 2014-24 are non-horizons, based on the ephemeral idea of non-existent planes and lost futures. Channelling painting by numbers and colouring books, they were created using digitally modified found images, traced and layered multiple times onto paper, creating a web of abstract shapes. The originals become hidden in a forest of post-representational visual noise, and are painted using a colour map theorem, ensuring that no two adjacent colours are the same. This systematic approach rendered foreground and background indistinguishable, creating a non-hierarchical colour distribution. "Haunted by the history and context of painting, I establish rules beforehand to organise what colours will be used, where and how, to undermine self-expression. I am like a one-eyed ambient robot crawling across the surface of the painting, eradicating depth perception and diminishing aesthetic choices to chance encounters.” (Sarah Iremonger 2024)
Found images used to create this work include drawings based on screensavers, nature camouflages, photographs of Cork Harbour, Skellig Michael, Star Wars and the works of painters James Arthur O'Connor 1792-1841, George Barret 1728-1774 and Piet Mondrian 1872-1944.
A 2023 development into digital media sees drawings from Horizons transformed into digital 3-D landscapes with the help of Net Artist Daniel Murray, exploring ideas of situationlessness, presented in the paper The Lady of the Lake is Hiding in the Expanded Field at the ‘2nd Symposium on Digital Art in Ireland’, UCC, June 2024.
This work includes a public participation project, Build Your Own Horizon/BYOH developed for Bealtaine Festival and Uillinn, West Cork Arts Centre, 2022, exhibited at 'Fragments in Constellation' with Re:Group for the Skibbereen Arts Festival, 2022; exhibited at 'Coalescence' The Lavit Gallery Cork, 2024 and ‘Press Play’ Oliver Sears Gallery, Dublin, 2019; and was funded through a Cork County Council, Arts Grants Scheme Award, 2015.
Also see texts Cantos-Open Horizons, 2024
2014 saw the development of a collaborative project, Horizons, with the poet Derek Mahon (1941-2020), who completed a prose piece and poem of the same name, published as part of the collections ‘Olympia and the Internet' and 'Against The Clock', both The Gallery Press in 2017 and 2018 respectively. (see below)
'Why don't you paint horizons?' poet Derek Mahon (1941-2020) asked me in 2014 in response to my early abstract paintings. A collaboration began where a poem and text about horizons were written (by Derek). I started a series of paintings: Horizons 2014-24 are non-horizons, based on the ephemeral idea of non-existent planes and lost futures. Channelling painting by numbers and colouring books, they were created using digitally modified found images, traced and layered multiple times onto paper, creating a web of abstract shapes. The originals become hidden in a forest of post-representational visual noise, and are painted using a colour map theorem, ensuring that no two adjacent colours are the same. This systematic approach rendered foreground and background indistinguishable, creating a non-hierarchical colour distribution. "Haunted by the history and context of painting, I establish rules beforehand to organise what colours will be used, where and how, to undermine self-expression. I am like a one-eyed ambient robot crawling across the surface of the painting, eradicating depth perception and diminishing aesthetic choices to chance encounters.” (Sarah Iremonger 2024)
Found images used to create this work include drawings based on screensavers, nature camouflages, photographs of Cork Harbour, Skellig Michael, Star Wars and the works of painters James Arthur O'Connor 1792-1841, George Barret 1728-1774 and Piet Mondrian 1872-1944.
Development into the digital world sees drawings from the Horizons project transformed into virtual 3-D digital landscapes, with the help of Net Artist Daniel Murray, exploring a sense of dislocation and disorientation, situationlessness and groundlessness created by a data-driven digital era, presented at 2nd Symposium on Digital Art in Ireland at UCC June 2024 see Texts: The Lady of the Lake is Hiding in the Expanded Field.
This work explores ideas of perception and representation and how, as a hangover of the romantic tradition, representation perpetuates scenarios of separation from the world around us. Focusing on appropriation and adaptation of found images places the agency of subject matter and personal artistic expression in the background; visual signifiers become hidden in a forest of post-representational camouflage mirroring the digital storm in which we find ourselves enmeshed today.
This work includes a public participation project, Build Your Own Horizon/BYOH developed for the Bealtaine Festival and Uillinn, West Cork Arts Centre, Skibbereen 2022 and was exhibited as part of 'Fragments in Constellation' with Re:Group for the Skibbereen Arts Festival 2022. The project involved a drawing workshop where participants drew the horizons from the windows of each floor at Uillinn / West Cork Arts Centre. Uillinn is situated in the centre of Skibbereen town, a contemporary building rising four floors, providing panoramic views of the town on several levels. This project explored the idea of the horizon as endlessly shifting and ephemeral, depending on the perspective/situation of the viewer, a situationless situatedness. The drawings were produced as cardboard cut-outs, installed in the studio and exhibited in the O'Driscoll building as part of the Skibbereen Art Festival 2022.
Distant Horizon includes images based on the mouth of Cork Harbour and abstract works of Piet Mondrian, Submerged Horizon is a reflection on the idea of ‘lost islands’ in this case Skellig Michael, the loss here is of the islands' identity to corporate, popular and tourist culture, water camouflages and Star Wars imagery have been used to achieve this. Beyond the Horizon looks at the idea of creating fantasy landscapes based on the works of Irish nineteenth-century painter James Arthur O’Connor, buried underneath nature camouflages and plastic waste vectors.
Painting and drawing are the chosen media for this project because they offer a particular structure; lines and planes of colour. At the same time, they allow the organisation of information in new and unexpected ways. This is an opportunity to explore and reference the history of painting. The old opening up to the new!
Using watercolour has enabled me to explore intense colour combinations. The works reference computerised pixilation achieved through multiple images, which have been superimposed and traced on top of one another, fragmenting the original image and painted in the style of camouflage. The resulting images have implications about the processes involved in understanding our visual world. 'Pre-visual' memory of objects seen as abstract shapes in early childhood informs this work, how once we 'know' what the object is we are looking at, it becomes fixed in our mind as part of the recognisable world. The fragmentation or abstraction of recognisable visual images here attempts to recreate the process of understanding and misunderstanding the visual world.
The undermining of the identity of Skellig Michael is explored in Submerged Horizon to complicate the recently assumed identity of the island as 'The Star Wars Island' through the creation of a series of camouflages for Skellig Michael, which include a Star Wars camouflage based on a simplified version of a stormtrooper helmet. This work investigates the identity of the place, including that of a spiritual historical site (Skellig Michael), and how this identity has been co-opted or displaced for mass media and corporate gain. Their style references early 20th-century abstract art with a digital twist, by focusing on appropriation and adaptation of found images, placing the agency of subject matter and personal artistic expression in the background, visual signifiers become hidden in a forest of post-representational camouflage.
Documentation of the process and research material is included here.
This work has been funded by a Cork County Council Arts Grants Scheme Award 2015 and two residencies at Cill Rialaig, Ballinskelligs, Co. Kerry, 2014 & 15, works were exhibited as part of ‘Press Play’ at Oliver Sears Gallery, Dublin 2019.
Sarah Iremonger 2025
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Horizons
Night Wind - a continual, baffled aspirate -
wanders the water like a vagrant spirit
seeking repose but there is no repose
till morning, when the tide withdraws
from exposed depths to the south-west
with its imaginary Islands of the Blest.
A straight line, wherever the edge may be,
confines and also opens up the sea
to ancient shipwreck, drowned forest,
lost continents and nuclear waste.
You hear a different music of the spheres
depending where you stand on these quiet shores.
Relatedly, beyond the blue horizon,
beyond the rising and declining sun
and more horizons, and among real waves
the line receded to infinite alternatives
before the final hot sand or pack ice.
Nobody clears the same horizon twice.
Same thing with time. When you were twenty-one
you took it for granted you would die young
as genius should. Now that you're seventy-five,
sails idly fluttering, but still alive,
you sit becalmed, imagining the many
horizons past and those to come, if any.
Derek Mahon 2017
'Against The Clock' The Gallery Press 2018
Horizons
'A white van dashes past. ‘Cleaning Solutions’, it reads, ‘in pursuit of global excellence.’ Biscuits are made with ‘joy’. Excellence and joy are now trade terms; ‘horizon’ too. What with training schemes and management speak, horizons, always figuratively useful – new horizons, broader horizons, time horizons – have a busier metaphorical life than ever. They’re especially good for adding a touch of mystery to the banal (what lies beyond the horizon?) but are often themselves banal, and in art can verge on kitsch: it’s a risky proposition. Beyond the horizon lie other horizons, each as ephemeral as the last; but the ephemeral is fascinating in itself. Waves slide and dance continuously out there, while what we see from the shore is only a straight line, often choppy, dividing sea from sky. A rough stretch of water presents itself as plane geometry; and a strange residue of Ptolemaic, flat-earth thinking, somewhere in the genes, see horizons as a form of enclosure. We note surface activity – surfers, white sails, container ships – and imagine water temperatures and the Gulf Stream which, driven by prevailing winds, can move at a hundred miles a day and still be warm when it reaches us. Boundary, margin, limit, edge, says Roget; perimeter, skyline, rim. Horizons are all these things and more. They’re where we live; they’re there wherever we go, be they land, sea or city roof horizons. Symbolic land horizons include sand deserts, that enigmatic, ocean-like phenomenon. Paul Bowles, in his strange, slow-moving Algerian novel The Sheltering Sky (1949), gets close to it: (Kit) ‘touched the window-pane; it was ice-cold. The bus bumped and swayed as it continued upward across the plateau…. Here in the desert, even more than at sea, she had the impression that she was on top of a great table, that the horizon was the brink of space.’ She experiences the Sahara as an existential extremity.
Considered philosophically, horizons present us with a paradox, confining and liberating our vision at the same time; nor are they real, or only momentarily so. While gratifying visual expectation, they remain imaginative constructs, fictions; the closer to them we get the more they recede, the more far-fetched they seem. Between the bright edge, that slight meniscus, and the immediate foreground, what dark depths, what intensity! Surrounded by land horizons (a line of hills, fields, houses, woods), why do we think primarily of sea horizons? Because they’re open, and because popular culture of the early 20th century, heyday of ocean travel, looked on them with such favour. Gaelic poets scanned them once for aid from overseas, but they seem not to have interested Shakespeare, for example, a Warwickshire man, who gives them no specific mention where you’d most expect, in The Tempest and so on; or Defoe (Crusoe is too busy to gaze out to sea), or the 18th century, except for those Gaelic poets and William Cowper, when the modern sailing and swimming cults had yet to establish themselves, as they soon did with Byron and the rest. The rise of 19th-century imperialism gave horizons a new significance: all that tonnage racing back and forth to India and China. Their popularity peaked in the 1930s, those hard times, with the likes of Ernst Lubitsch’s flighty movie Monte Carlo (1930), where Jeanette MacDonald sings ‘Beyond the Blue Horizon’ (lyrics by Leo Robin), and James Hilton’s best-selling novel Lost Horizon (1933), which exploited the romance of long-distance flight and introduced the world to ‘Shangri-La’. Proust was on to Horizons early. A boy, though a precocious one, Marcel watches the evening sea from his hotel room at Balbec (Á l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, the Scott Moncrieff translation): ‘Sometimes the ocean filled almost the whole of my window, raised as it was by a band of sky edged at the top only by a line the same blue as the sea so that I supposed it to be still sea and the change in colour due only to some effect of lighting. Another day the sea was painted only in the lower part of the window, all the rest of which was filled with so many clouds, packed one against another in horizontal bands, that its panes seemed… to be presenting a “Cloud Study”.’
They cry out, as in Proust, for artistic representation; and more than this, for they work too as a compositional principle in art, what with frames and framing devices or their absence. (Howard Hodgkin painted on the frames themselves, and now we have the ‘expanded field’ of art outside the box.) The realistic horizon as a compositional principle has been a feature of landscape painting at least since the 17th century of Claude and Ruisdael. Sarah Iremonger, a contemporary artist, once put it like this: ‘The vertical line suggests an actual presence, a being, whereas the horizontal line describes a place for that being to exist.’ She worked in the vertical for several years: dark upright panels – blues, greens – aspiring to black as in ‘Blue Light’ (1994) and ‘Night Light’ (1995). She has also worked in the horizontal: often a deep dark sea and a cloudy sky, laterally trisected, a hint of light at the horizon itself, but not really representational, ‘not pictures of horizons but experiments with paint.’ In there too is a ‘literary’ component. A close reader of Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry (1767) and related things, she warms to the nature of the ‘sublime’ as embodied in vastness and infinity; in horizons. Real horizons? No, schematic horizons: we’re not talking about seascapes here but about art scapes, even thoughtscapes. ‘This new idea,’ said Mondrian of abstraction, ‘will ignore the particulars of appearance, that is to say, natural form and colour; on the contrary, it should find its expression in the abstraction of form and colour.’ Iremonger now appropriates and disrupts this aesthetic, and the framing functions of colour and form. Her horizons define themselves not in realistic, or even abstract terms, but in imaginative ones: what lies beyond. What lies beyond perceived reality, the received frame of reference? Shifting frames, ontological alternatives, deep-water mysteries, drowned forests, shipwrecks, Star Wars, vanishing continents?
Marie Heaney, in Over Nine Waves (1994), renders a famous moment in the story of Niamh and Oisín (Finn Cycle) as follows: ‘Ahead of them they saw a most delightful country bathed in sunshine, spread out in all its splendour. Set amid the smooth rich plains was a majestic fortress that shone like a prism in the sun. Surrounding it were airy halls and summerhouses built with great artistry and inlaid with precious stones.’ The pair have arrived at Tír na nÓg where nobody grows old and sorrow is unknown. (The name survives in that of a beach-front resort in Antigua, a folk band, and video games including the techno-fascist Mystic Knights of Tír na nÓg.) But this shining destination is only of several imaginary places in the Atlantic. Hy-Brasil, supposedly a circular island a hundred miles or so off the southwest of Ireland, appeared on maps as late as the 19th century. Dodging sea monsters and waterspouts, St. Brendan went in search of it, says the Navigation. Perhaps there was once such an island, since submerged by rising sea levels or subsidence of the sea bed. Paul Simons, in Weird Weather (1996), describes thermal inversions, mirages caused by weather: ‘When conditions are calm and warm air sits on top of cool air it creates a “temperature inversion” which behaves like a mirror, bending light and… revealing places hidden by the curve of the earth.’ The early Christian writers endowed such apparitions with religious significance (‘Brendan’ speaks):
I passed the voiceless anchorites, their isles,
Saw the ice-palaces upon the seas,
Mentioned Christ’s name to men cut off from men,
Heard the whales snort, and saw the Kraken!
- Padraic Colum, ‘The Burial of Saint Brendan’
Uí Breasil, O’Brasil, the Breasal country, was named for St. Bresal (6th c.), a friend of Brendan, or perhaps for St. Bresal (8th c.), once an abbot of Iona. Isola or Insula de Brazil appears on 14th c. maps and stayed there at the same spot for centuries. Shortly after its disappearance from ‘history’, if not from myth and legend, Brunel’s Great Eastern laid the first successful transatlantic cable from Kerry to Newfoundland. There are many fibre-optic cables now, and no doubt that’s good news. Rachel Carson reported the bad news decades ago in a famous preface to the 1960 reissue of The Sea Around Us (1951), where she warned about the future of radio-active material: ‘By its very vastness and its seeming remoteness, the sea has invited the attention of those who have the problem of disposal, and with very little discussion and almost no public notice… has been selected as a “natural” burying place for contaminated rubbish.’ It doesn’t seem so as you look out at the waves and contemplate the horizon; but these things – drowned forests, shipwrecks, mythical lands, cables and nuclear waste – lie there in the subconscious, of which the Big Blue is a famously potent symbol.
We hear a different music of the spheres according to where we sit in the auditorium, said Einstein; and we see a different horizon according to where we stand on the shore. This relativity, and related deflections, inform Iremonger’s post-conceptual art. Working, for example, from digitally manipulated versions of traditional paintings, or from photographs of the sea as seen from Cobh, looking south over the Cork Harbour area, she uses deconstructive ‘colour separations’ to create images which are themselves horizons of thought. Nothing definitely is, everything is becoming; vision becomes re-vision, brine becomes watercolour: ‘I am painting about the horizons of painting, not horizons themselves as a subject but painting as the subject.’ So instead of familiar horizons, though she starts with these, we get event horizons of a kind, where previous convictions vanish, to be replaced by fragmentation (screensaver ‘tiles’) and re-construction, psychic flow, indeterminacy, unknowable futures. I could have wished for a few gills; but these artworks – paintings, photos, neon drawings – chart a voyage from the interior to the open sea and, while remaining themselves, document expanding fields of creative possibility, wherever the edge may be.'
Derek Mahon 2016
'Olympia and the Internet' The Gallery Press 2017
Horizons work at 'Coalescence' exhibition, The Lavit Gallery, Cork, Ireland, June-July 2024; (from left) Submerged Horizon with Skellig Michael, Star Wars and water camouflage, 2017; Subsumed Horizon with Skellig Michael, screensavers and camouflage images, 2022; Lost Horizon after ‘Moon Light Scene' 'In the Dargle Country' 'On Coming Storm' and 'Figure in a Landscape with Waterfall' by J. A. O’Connor 1832, 2019; Beyond the Horizon after 'A Thunderstorm' by J.A. O'Connor 1832, woodland camouflage and plastic bottle vectors, 2018.
Horizons work at 'Coalescence' exhibition, The Lavit Gallery, Cork, Ireland, June-July 2024; (from left) Submerged Horizon with Skellig Michael, Star Wars and water camouflage, 2017; Subsumed Horizon with Skellig Michael, screensavers and camouflage images, 2022; Lost Horizon after ‘Moon Light Scene' 'In the Dargle Country' 'On Coming Storm' and 'Figure in a Landscape with Waterfall' by J. A. O’Connor 1832, 2019; Beyond the Horizon after 'A Thunderstorm' by J.A. O'Connor 1832, woodland camouflage and plastic bottle vectors, 2018.
Horizons work at 'Coalescence' exhibition, The Lavit Gallery, Cork, Ireland, June-July 2024; (left) Entangled Horizon 3, ink pen on paper, 52 x 70 cm; (right) Entangled Horizon, watercolour on paper, 50 x 69 cm, 2024, after 'View of Powerscourt Waterfall' by G. Barret, 1760.
Horizons work at 'Coalescence' exhibition, The Lavit Gallery, Cork, Ireland, June-July 2024; (left) Entangled Horizon 3, ink pen on paper, 52 x 70 cm; (right) Entangled Horizon, watercolour on paper, 50 x 69 cm, 2024, after 'View of Powerscourt Waterfall' by G. Barret, 1760.
The original painting by George Barret’s 18th-century paintings of the 'View of Powerscourt Waterfall' 1760 (he painted several versions - one is in the National Gallery of Ireland and another is in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool) used as source material to create drawings and paintings and develop digital 3-dimensional virtual landscapes.
Exploring ideas about disrupted representation, this drawing uses a combination of digital and analogue procedures. The first stage was to make several digital versions of ‘View of Powerscourt Waterfall’ by G. Barret, 1760, by changing the settings for detail and edges in Photoshop. Printing the images as line drawings and projecting them onto paper, tracing and turning them back to front and upside down to create a network of lines.
Exploring ideas about disrupted representation, this painting uses a combination of digital and analogue procedures. The first stage was to make several digital versions of ‘View of Powerscourt Waterfall’ by G. Barret, 1760, by changing the settings for detail and edges in Photoshop. Printing and tracing the images as line drawings and projecting them onto paper, turning them back to front and upside down to create a framework to hold the colours. Then painting one colour at a time ambiently across the entire surface so that the same colour never touches following the Colour Map Theorem.
Exploring ideas about disrupted representation, this drawing uses a combination of digital and analogue procedures. The first stage was to make several digital versions of ‘View of Powerscourt Waterfall’ by G. Barret, 1760, by changing the settings for detail and edges in Photoshop. Printing the images as line drawings and projecting them onto paper, tracing and turning them back to front and upside down to create a network of lines.
Exploring ideas about disrupted representation, this drawing uses a combination of digital and analogue procedures. The first stage was to make several digital versions of ‘View of Powerscourt Waterfall’ by G. Barret, 1760, by changing the settings for detail and edges in Photoshop. Printing the images as line drawings and projecting them onto paper, tracing and turning them back to front and upside down to create a network of lines, and then tracing over the lines with an ink pen. It has been cropped and blurred so that Blender could transform it into a 3-D landscape.
Exploring ideas about disrupted representation, this drawing uses a combination of digital and analogue procedures. The first stage was to make several digital versions of ‘View of Powerscourt Waterfall’ by G. Barret, 1760, by changing the settings for detail and edges in Photoshop. Printing the images as line drawings and projecting them onto paper, tracing and turning them back to front and upside down to create a network of lines.
Entangled Horizon 2 drawing of digitised images of ‘View of Powerscourt Waterfall’ by G. Barret, 1760, created by changing the detail and contour parameters of the source image, projecting the images onto paper, tracing them and then drawing over the traced images with ink, rendered as a virtual digital 3-dimensional landscape, with the drawing overlayed and developed in Blender.
Detail of Entangled Horizon 2 drawing of digitised images of ‘View of Powerscourt Waterfall’ by G. Barret, 1760, created by changing the detail and contour parameters of the source image, projecting the images onto paper, tracing them and then drawing over the traced images with ink, rendered as a virtual digital 3-dimensional landscape, with the drawing overlayed and developed in Blender.
Entangled Horizon 2 drawing of digitised images of ‘View of Powerscourt Waterfall’ by G. Barret, 1760, created by changing the detail and contour parameters of the source image, projecting the images onto paper, tracing them and then drawing over the traced images with ink, rendered as a virtual digital 3-dimensional landscape, with the drawing overlayed and developed in Blender.
Detail of Entangled Horizon 2 drawing of digitised images of ‘View of Powerscourt Waterfall’ by G. Barret, 1760, created by changing the detail and contour parameters of the source image, projecting the images onto paper, tracing them and then drawing over the traced images with ink, rendered as a virtual digital 3-dimensional landscape, with the drawing overlayed and developed in Blender.
Entangled Horizon 2 drawing of digitised images of ‘View of Powerscourt Waterfall’ by G. Barret, 1760, created by changing the detail and contour parameters of the source image, projecting the images onto paper, tracing them and then drawing over the traced images with ink, rendered as a virtual digital 3-dimensional landscape, with the drawing overlayed and developed in Blender.
Detail of Entangled Horizon 2 drawing of digitised images of ‘View of Powerscourt Waterfall’ by G. Barret, 1760, created by changing the detail and contour parameters of the source image, projecting the images onto paper, tracing them and then drawing over the traced images with ink, rendered as a virtual digital 3-dimensional landscape, with the drawing overlayed and developed in Blender.
Detail of Entangled Horizon 2 drawing of digitised images of ‘View of Powerscourt Waterfall’ by G. Barret, 1760, created by changing the detail and contour parameters of the source image, projecting the images onto paper, tracing them and then drawing over the traced images with ink, rendered as a virtual digital 3-dimensional landscape, with the drawing overlayed and developed in Blender.
Detail of Entangled Horizon 2 drawing of digitised images of ‘View of Powerscourt Waterfall’ by G. Barret, 1760, created by changing the detail and contour parameters of the source image, projecting the images onto paper, tracing them and then drawing over the traced images with ink, rendered as a virtual digital 3-dimensional landscape, with the drawing overlayed and developed in Blender.
Uncut template for Build Your Own Horizon BYOH/Uillinn, a site-specific public participation project, created for the 'Bealtaine Artist in Residence' program at Uillinn, West Cork Arts Centre, in association with Cork County Council, May 2022.
Exhibited as part of the Skibbereen Arts Festival, July 2022
Uncut template for Build Your Own Horizon BYOH/Uillinn, a site-specific public participation project, created for the 'Bealtaine Artist in Residence' program at Uillinn, West Cork Arts Centre, in association with Cork County Council, May 2022.
Exhibited as part of the Skibbereen Arts Festival, July 2022
Cut-out prototype for Build Your Own Horizon/Uillinn, a site-specific public participation project, created for the 'Bealtaine Artist in Residence' program at Uillinn, West Cork Arts Centre, in association with Cork County Council, May 2022.
Exhibited as part of the Skibbereen Arts Festival, July 2022
This drawing explores ideas about disrupted representation, using a combination of digital and analogue procedures to create the image. Using nature camouflages as source material, it was created by projecting the images onto paper and tracing them.
This drawing explores ideas about disrupted representation, using a combination of digital and analogue procedures to create the image. The first stage was to digitise the original painting by J.A. O'Connor and make several versions by changing the settings for detail and edges in Photoshop. Printing the images as line drawings, which were projected onto paper and traced along with drawings from digital screensavers.
Drawing of images of Cork Harbour and Mondrian Compositions. This drawing explores ideas about disrupted representation, using a combination of digital and analogue procedures to create the image. Drawing images of Cork Harbour from photographs and Mondrian painting compositions, created by projecting and tracing the images onto paper.
Drawing of collaged digital images of Skellig Michael and screensavers. This drawing explores ideas about disrupted representation, using a combination of digital and analogue procedures to create the image. The first stage was to make several versions by changing the settings for detail and edges in Photoshop of a found image of Skellig Michael. Printing the images as line drawings, projecting and tracing them onto paper.
Drawing of digital images of J.A. O'Connor, woodland camouflage and plastic bottles, leaf and nuclear explosion vectors. This drawing explores ideas about disrupted representation, using a combination of digital and analogue procedures to create the image. The first stage was to make several versions of the original painting by J.A. O'Connor by changing the settings for detail and edges in Photoshop. Printing the images as line drawings and projecting and tracing them onto paper, along with drawings of woodland camouflage, plastic bottles, leaf and nuclear explosion vectors.
Painting of digital images after J. A. O'Connor, painted in the style of camouflage. Exploring ideas about disrupted representation, using a combination of digital and analogue procedures. The first stage was to make digital versions of the original paintings ‘Moon Light Scene' 'In the Dargle Country' 'On Coming Storm' and 'Figure in a Landscape with Waterfall' by J. A. O’Connor, 1832, to create a framework to hold the colours, then painting one colour at a time ambiently across the entire surface so that the same colour never touched, each shape painted as a separate unit following the Colour Map Theorem.
Painting of digital images of Skellig Michael, screensavers and camouflage, painted in the style of camouflage. Exploring ideas about disrupted representation, using a combination of digital and analogue procedures. The first stage was to digitise a found image of Skellig Michael by changing the settings for detail and edges in Photoshop. Printing and tracing the image as a line drawing, along with images of screensavers, projected onto paper and traced to create a framework to hold the colours, then painting one colour at a time ambiently across the entire surface so that the same colour never touched, each shape painted as a separate unit following the Colour Map Theorem.
Painting of digital images after J.A. O'Connor and screensavers, painted in the style of camouflage. Exploring ideas about disrupted representation, using a combination of digital and analogue procedures. The first stage was to digitise the original painting 'In the Dargle Country' by J.A. O'Connor, 1829, by changing the settings for detail and edges in Photoshop. Printing and tracing the image as a line drawing along with images of screensavers, projected onto paper and traced to create a framework to hold the colours, then painting one colour at a time ambiently across the entire surface so that the same colour never touched, each shape painted as a separate unit following the Colour Map Theorem.
Painting of digital images after J.A. O'Connor, woodland camouflage and plastic bottle vectors painted in the style of camouflage. This painting explores ideas about disrupted representation, using a combination of digital and analogue procedures to create. The first stage was to digitise the original painting 'A Thunderstorm' by J.A. O'Connor, 1832, by changing the settings for detail and edges in Photoshop. Printing and tracing the image as a line drawing along with images of woodland camouflage and plastic bottle vectors, projected onto paper and traced to create a framework to hold the colours, then painting one colour at a time ambiently across the entire surface so that the same colour never touched, each shape painted as a separate unit following the Colour Map Theorem.
Exhibited as part of 'Press Play' Oliver Sears Gallery, Dublin, 2019
Painting of digital images of Cork Harbour from photographs and Mondrian compositions painted in the style of camouflage. This painting explores ideas about disrupted representation, using a combination of digital and analogue procedures. The first stage was to trace the photographs of Cork Harbour along with images of Mondrian compositions, projected onto paper and traced multiple times to create a framework to hold the colours, then it was painted one colour at a time ambiently across the entire surface so that the same colour never touched, each shape was painted as a separate unit following the Colour Map Theorem.
Exhibited as part of 'Press Play' Oliver Sears Gallery, Dublin, 2019
Painting of digital images of Skellig Michael, Star Wars and water camouflages painted in the style of camouflage. This painting explores ideas about disrupted representation, using a combination of digital and analogue procedures. The first stage was to digitise the found image of Skellig Michael by changing the settings for detail and edges in Photoshop. Printing and tracing the image as a line drawing along with images from Star Wars and water camouflages, projected onto paper and traced to create a framework to hold the colours, then it was painted one colour at a time ambiently across the entire surface so that the same colour never touched, each shape was painted as a separate unit following the Colour Map Theorem.
Exhibited as part of 'Salon' 2018 and 'Press Play' Oliver Sears Gallery, Dublin, 2019
Studies for woodland, pink, sea and desert camouflage for Skellig Michael, created by changing the detail and contour parameters of the found image, tracing and duplicating the projected image onto paper.
Blurred studies for woodland, pink, sea and desert camouflage for Skellig Michael, created by changing the detail and contour parameters of the found image, tracing and duplicating the projected image onto paper.
Blurred and non-blurred studies of colour separation camouflage for Skellig Michael fragmented and duplicated into images of floating photo screensavers, created by changing the detail and contour parameters of the images and tracing the projected images onto paper.
Colour separation images, cyan, yellow, black and magenta of Skellig Michael have been superimposed into fragmented and duplicated images of floating photo screensavers, created by changing the detail and contour parameters of the images and tracing the projected images onto paper.
Multiple images of colour separation floating photo screensavers superimposed onto images of Skellig Michael, created by changing the detail and contour parameters of the images and tracing the projected images onto paper.
Images of floating photo screensavers superimposed onto a blurred colour separation image of Skellig Michael painted as blurred colour separations, created by changing the detail and contour parameters of the image and tracing the projected images onto paper.
Image of colour separation floating photo screensavers superimposed onto a fragmented and duplicated image of Skellig Michael painted as colour separations, created by changing the detail and contour parameters of the image and tracing the projected images onto paper.
Posterised found photograph of Skellig Michael, a drawing based on this image has been used for the design of the Skellig camouflage, part of the research material, created by changing the detail and contour parameters of the image.