Born in Dublin

Born in Dublin Ireland my journey in image making began when I was eight years old. I must have expressed an interest in photography because Santa Claus placed a beginner's photo chemistry kit under our Christmas tree.

My parents had a old fashioned brass bed with heavy blankets that reached the ground. It was under there that I set up my "alchemists cave" and began a life long experiment in image making.

For me there is a need to express something more than the perfect likeness that the camera captures, an inherent desire for the hand of the artist to be felt in the work. Within a very short space of time I began trying to enhance my images using various techniques, including applying tints from the kits that, in those distant days, came with Kodak black and white printing kits.

I worked in several studios in Dublin and London, England and had the priceless opportunity to watch some great professionals at work. During that time I also had access to state of the art darkrooms in which to further my experiments with color, textures, tints and explore printing techniques both traditional and contemporary.

Influences

The work of such photographers as Nikolai Andreev and Ernst Haas intrigued me, their abstract colors and impressionist feel, leading to my combining techniques such as adding pigments, layers of texture, painted backgrounds, tints and airbrush that give my work it's unique look and feel..... in the end it is, I suppose, a fusion of photography and painting.

It was a long and interesting development. The work I produced for my first one man exhibition in 1982, clearly showed the birth of an style that leads to the images of today.

Now I think of the camera as part of a process, a sketchbook really, to capture ideas in the journey toward my final image.

I work with a variety of substrates, choosing different elements to suit the image I am creating.

My work is available in a signed Limited Edition of 25.

Limited Editions are produced in my studio using ultrachome archival pigments.

Limited Edition Fine Art Prints

Limited edition fine art prints are original artworks. This work is conceived and developed by me, for the purpose of making a fine art edition.

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