A getaway to Donegal, on the Wild Atlantic Way is a cinematic experience — allowing you to sit back and lose yourself in the spectacle.

It returns you ‘utterly transformed’, as they’d put it in neighbouring Yeats Country, and ready for the world again. Driving homeward on the winding hill out of Cresslough village, I feel fully unwound — I stop a while to take in the end credits.

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.

It was fitting that I really pushed this piece to the point of abstraction to capture something of the sense of escaping reality in Donegal. A sea of bright colour shards flows down the hill, gathering in the foreground like a broken stained glass window. There are a sequence of graphic cues, road markings, a single letter of a pub sign and zip like corner stones, all helping to tether the compostion to reality as buildings fully appear. Daylight spills through gap between buildings, casting shadows across the road and countering the bright shards.

This short stop in Cresslough always reassures me that everything is ‘right’ again — as I set of to join the real world again.