I am nearly sixty-five, so have over fifty years of experience making paintings and photographs.

I started photography and doing my own developing and printing while working in a Merchant Bank in London. It was not for me the commute to the city. Then there were a few years as a welder the money was fantastic, but I escaped to Ireland and after three years in a couple of Art schools I bought Ballyrogan House a ruin with ruined buildings around an impressive yard and a couple of secret gardens.

Attracta visited with some Artists that she knew, to see where this group of Artists were using Ballyrogan as a group of studios and all living together in the dwelling house. A few years passed and Attracta asked me to marry her on February the 29th, an Irish leap-year custom and I said yes, on the next Friday the 13th we were married.

So its forty years in the Art Centre at Ballyrogan and just over thirty-six years married. Attracta and I have different approaches to painting: I like to prepare the ground on which to paint, either on Plywood (never MDF) or on canvas, and then generally with Acrylic used in the manner of 17th Century Dutch painters. I also enjoy making grounds or stretching and priming canvas or linen for Attracta to paint on. This fits in well with the Arts and Craft movement started at the time of the Pre-Raphaelites being part of the entire creative process.
My inspiration comes from the ‘every day’. Images that I have snapped with the phone, photographed with the big Bronica or even cameras from ‘charity shops, I’m even thinking of using ‘stills’ from Supper Eight films that I shot in Dublin in the 1970s, I like what I paint to have proof that it existed. I try also to have a metta narrative hidden within the image. An example would be a washing line where the objects drying tells you about the people using the line.
A future wish might be to get a grant: first, to be able to pay a curator to select a show to be hung in a set of cities, internationally, of photographs from negatives or slides from the 1970s or 1980s. Or even of the building of the motorway just by us that we passed daily for a couple of years. And secondly to defray the cost of production for what would be a non- commercial show.
I find making work after forty years doesn’t get any easier. I am shocked by how wonderful Grand Children are, and that there are so many things that I don’t have time to do.