Several years ago I started drawing these little cartoons that I called “The Man” and each little image was a quirky or philosophical musing on what it was to be alive. Most of them are pretty absurd (and crudely drawn) but they struck a chord with some other friends, one of whom even made a […]
Found this old sketch in my notebook of a character I created called Blockhead O’Yeah, and he was a cubist piece of art who had come to life to inspire his fellow characters. This little nugget of wisdom must have been my subconscious giving me a pep talk!
Found some old sketches in my notebook for a series of large scale paintings I wanted to do called The Palate Series (or maybe The Pallet Series) which used sayings and phrases from different languages (English, French, German, Swedish) that played with the idea of language – often a linguistic turn of phrase or idea. […]
Back in 2014, myself, Erin Fornoff, Colm Keegan, Linda Devlin, Phil Lynch and Stephen James Smith founded and ran Ireland’s first ever (and only) spoken word festival, and it ran for three glorious years. It was a wild, wonderful rollercoaster of a journey that is worthy of a much longer post. But for now , […]
A pumpkin that I carved with my friends to look like Klaus Kinski as Nosferatu.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Another one from my sketchbooks around the year 2001 or 2002. This one was drawn during a pretty politically charged and sensitive time in America, and I had just lived through the September 11th terrorist attacks, so was undoubtedly influenced by that. But at the same time it feels kind of jokey and irreverent, which […]
I went through a phase of sketching and drawing quite a lot from around 2000 to 2003. Painting and drawing were never a creative pursuit I considered myself particularly adept at, which actually meant it felt very freeing to simply doodle and paint without any consideration of an audience or indeed expectation. I have very […]
