blog
Remembering my mother – artist and inspiration
25 years ago today I lost my mother to cancer. While there is much I can say about the experience of losing someone so young, I will leave that for another day. But today I reflect on the incredible joy she brought to my life. She was a remarkable artist and craftswoman. She would weave […]
Creativity takes time
Having one of those days where I need to remind myself that you can’t force yourself to be creative. These things take time. So, I am going back to some writing exercises and idea starters to just kickstart my brain. I often find that I just need to ease myself into a state of flow. […]
All Together Now festival
If any of you Ireland-based folks are heading to the All Together Now festival this weekend, I will be hosting an incredible Brownbread Mixtape show on the Sunday with some of the finest spoken word artists in the world (Jasmine Gardosi and Erin Fornoff), as well as performing some classic radio-style comedy skecthes with our […]
Meet Your Maker podcast
I’m always on the lookout for inspiring stuff that looks at the creative process and delves into it with creative people. One of my current favourite obsessions is the brilliant Meet Your Maker podcast, where the amiable host Liam Geraghty interviews a slew of fascinating, creative people across multiple disciplines (puppetry, comics, special FX) and […]
The Far Side
I have been reading The Far Side cartoons with my kids over the past few months and I have been pleasantly reminded of how truly brilliant, concise and hilarious they are. In many ways they are the perfect little cartoon haiku. There is so much densely packed into each frame, and that constraint leads to […]
URBAN FUTURE COWBOY
Over the years I recorded my father, Tony Ryan, reading a host of different poems and written passages of mine. I still have hours of footage that I intend to create a longform piece with, but here was a quick assembly of one such recording I made, using some timelapse footage I shot from the […]
Gary Dunne on creativity, art and community
A few years ago, when I worked at Google, I would host a monthly Spark Session at the Innovation Space, Cloud 9, where I would invite artists, entrepreneurs and thought leaders along to share their journey and give us an insight into the creative process. The session would always close with a practical, hands-on […]
Jean Luc Godard on stories
Such a great reminder to not be bound by rules and traditional forms. Play with it. Beyond Godard, modern cinema has so many great examples of it – like Memento by Christopher Nolan, Pulp Fiction by Quentin Tarantino or Rashomon by Akira Kurosawa – and contemporary television shows like True Detective and Westworld thrive on […]
Red Guinness
One more from my sketchbooks at the turn of the millennium. This may have been an idea I was toying with as a fake ad campaign for our arty, satirical website artlick.com, or perhaps it was just a little gag for my own amusement. Either way, something about the simplicity and silliness of it still […]
