On the Causeway Coastal Route, you’ll find fans of the equally breath-taking ‘Game of Thrones’ flocking to film locations along the way. For over 400 years, fans of Bushmills® have had their breath taken away too — in the world's oldest licensed whiskey distillery. It’s just three miles from the highlight of the route, a place that has inspired some tall tales in its time — the awe-inspiring, 50 million-year-old, Giants Causeway.
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Among the curious columns and clambering crowds my eye was drawn to the stillness of a seated man, in a world of his own. For a fleeting moment the warm dappled light on him, the sea and the stones, wove him completely into the fabric of the landscape — the image resonated with me. I thought of how we each remember the same people and place a little differently from each other, like the irregularity in the stones of the Causeway — together they form a shared collective memory.
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Painting is like a hi-wire act for me, constantly balancing what I see on one side with what I feel about it on the other. My paintings aim to actively shift before your eyes, teetering on the tensions between realism and abstraction to keep the balance.
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Unexpected blocks of colour are balanced out with block of more muted tones, as your eye wanders over the composition and you begin to make sense of the scene — what is hidden is revealed.