describing, looking, painting

Painting is a serious form of artistic inquiry as well being an end in itself. Slow paintings are generally better than quick paintings. Colour can be distracting, and visual texture is undervalued. Good art looks like you could leave it out in the rain.

If it was possible to describe contemporary history in painting, it might be necessary to think of a sort of poetry without poems.

Describing means imagining paintings that unravel when explored. Paintings that ask to be re-conceptualised; that unstitch the given patterns of what painting does and says (and says it does).

Portrayal involves deconstructing images, by removing and unraveling the rules of depiction, forcing the viewer to reconstruct their view, to re-picture the image. There is no point in reiterating things that people already know.

Looking at the conflict around the protests against Shell in Ireland, I have been attempting to unpick the way painting can approach a political subject.

That these paintings take particular incidents on particular days as their starting point is clear. However, the events of those traumatic mornings play out again in their recounting, and these works are as much about the act of remembering as they are about what is remembered.

Tadhg McGrath

Dublin 2011