Was a career as an artist something you always aspired to? Tell us about your path to where you are today.

I always aspired to having a career in the creative arts, but in school I always dreamt that it would be something to do with music. My love of art came later. Music has been a passion of mine from the age of 14 or 15 and was nurtured in school, where I played clarinet and piano and started writing my own songs (poorly!). I went on to study music in Maynooth University, and started playing in a number of bands in Dublin. I spent fifteen years with the Harvest Ministers, a Dublin based band formed around the songwriting talents of Will Merriman. After releasing four albums and experiencing numerous highs but more lows, the band eventually wound down. I had always been interested in drawing but never had the time to give to painting, so with the free time I now had I threw myself into painting.

It became a way of winding down at the weekends from a pretty stressful job I had at the time in software production management, and I quickly realised that people liked what I was doing and wanted to buy my paintings. I started to exhibit at Art Ireland in the RDS and I found a number of galleries that wanted to show my work, all of which led me to realise I could make a career of it.

One of the first people to invite me to exhibit with them was Denise Donnelly, at the Bad Art Gallery in Dublin. I’ve been with Denise ever since, and we are celebrating 20 years together with my new show in the Doorway Gallery.

What is your process when creating a new work? How do certain themes and experiences feed into or present themselves in your art?

A landscape piece might start with something catching my eye on a car journey or a walk in the West. I might take some sketches or photographs but if the image stays with me then I will work on the painting from memory. I never look for detail, but instead focus on the structure or composition and build the painting from that. The colours reveal themselves. I have been using the same colour palette for the past 20 years and I think of them as the words I need to describe the landscapes of the West of Ireland that I paint.

My figurative pieces can be more inward looking, a way to express more personal feelings I may have at the time. They started as a way of including my own family in the landscapes I was painting, so a lot of them will feature family units and groups.

What has been the highlight of your career so far?

Having a sold out exhibition in Fremantle, Australia in 2018 is certainly one of them, but the highlight so far has been seeing my work being used on a Broadway stage in New York in 2019 as part of the Irish contemporary dance production Fáinne Óir by Kathy Fahy. I was commissioned to create 20 pieces to provide the projected backdrop for the show. The music was performed onstage by the Mayo Concert Orchestra and I was lucky enough to also play in the orchestra.

What is one thing you wish everyone knew about working as an artist?

The time spent actually painting or creating is the easy and the smallest part of the working day. The time spent beating yourself up and questioning your value and worth and which eventually leads to you creating something you are happy with (sometimes called the artist’s process!) , that is a challenge you have to get through each day.

As a self-taught artist, what would you say to a budding artist unsure of their next steps?

Try and find your own voice, keep looking for something that only you can offer, that is uniquely yours. In the coming world of AI dominance the most important thing we can do is try to connect on a human level, with personal integrity, and the arts will be critical to that.