Southill Salome Analysis

I wrote about your brushwork, beginning to work more alla prima, as opposed to the resurrection series which I imagine was wet on dry…

I’ll tell you about that period, and leading up to it. Do you see this piece here, it’s the “Southill Salome”. What happened was that I was in the studio one morning, I didn’t have the place downtown at that time. I used to paint in the morning at the time and I was painting in this realist style… well, they were surreal, surrealist realist you know. The children were young at the time, they had lots of ladybird books, and the quality of illustrations in some of those was very high. So for a while I was uneasy, these pieces were very much admired in a way, but I was thinking I’m becoming “an illustrator”, you know? Everything is so real, there is something more in me than just concocting these images, like the Elvis Presley picture, and the “Southill Salome” picture. And as a consequence I stopped. I didn’t stop …show more content…
When the mackerel came to be, I did them in watercolour, I didn’t use oils at all. I felt I was going in the right track, I did a fair few studies of them, just from photographs alone. So the mackerel was the beginning. And maybe, this is just a maybe, the study of herring which I remembered from going into the City Gallery when I was a child, when I was a little fellow, and I think subconsciously St John Hare, his picture was buried somewhere in my subconscious and it came out about 30 years later.

I remember reading your interview with Anne Sheridan years ago, and through reading you talking about the mackerel I began to understand these moments when an artist’s visual awareness and visual acuity “wakes up”. I had one of these moments myself, it was really profound. It was sublime and very visceral. I was driving on the Ballincollig Bypass, there was a great swathe