I was down in Pembroke visiting my friend Sue and mulling over what my next project should be. I was debating between concentrating on landscape or portrait and started doodling the most straight forward landscape imaginable, in my mind I kept coming up with the phrase 'one point perspective'. I experimented a little with placing a frame in the landscape, landscape within landscape, portrait within landscape. I noticed a similarity of form between the framed landscape and the format of some flags. The frame soon came to resemble cross hairs in my mind...

I suppose it was only to be expected because this was the time that details were emerging in the press about the massacre that took place during the 'civil' conflict in Yugoslavia. I suppose my interest in that conflict was that both Yugoslavia and Ireland were on the very margins of europe and this was at a time when the 'peace process' in Ireland was getting a lot of coverage in the news.

I used the same format for a series of paintings that I then went on to paint. For a while I became almost obsessed by the format and the idea of building up layers of dot like things on top which obscured the form. I spent hours building up flat layers of paint which I then decided to write over. There was no rehearsal for the text on those paintings, to some extent I was playing with the idea of writing as performance and painting as record.

To view the paintings, click on the painting at the top.