My old art teacher liked to say, “It’s not that you can’t draw - it’s that you can’t see.”

I’ve been drawing and painting professionally for 35 years and still attend a weekly life-drawing class — it helps me see.

I paint what interests me and my antenna is always on, seeking out interesting relationships between light and shade, past and present, abstraction and realism, people and place...

This piece captures an atmosphere of conviviality in a dimly lit hotel bar in the west of Ireland, thick with warm rich tones of early evening light. A cluster of people engaged in conversation seemed to be surreally disengaged from their lower limbs by the interplay of light on them and their surroundings. 

Figure drawing makes you keenly aware of subtleties in body language. Seated near me two people waited for others to rejoin them and the craic to restart. The man displaced his weight onto his thigh, skewing his torso to one side, his loosened tie followed. The woman near him seemed to counter his pose as she sat elegantly straight, chin slightly raised as she gently clasped her wrist.  

In this space between conversations, they sat silently drinking in the atmosphere — but, like me, they also sought out something of interest in the room to fill the space.