ARTIST’S STATEMENT

I grew up with a war quite literally on my doorstep.

This starts like a lot of my writing with a jump into my childhood and adolescence among the bricks and bombs of the north of Ireland, where I grew up with a war quite literally on my doorstep.

As a child I was told I was never without some chalk or pencil scrawling on walls or anything that wasn’t sufficiently nailed down. 

Rushing through years of my life in the north art and more specifically painting was my source of solace whether that be the icons at my chapel or the masked gunman on gable walls that acted as a visual aid and deterrent to those souls who walked our streets in uniforms not of Ireland.

The politics of art had and still has a place in my head and heart, how could it not when its endemic to your only form of true expression. 

Fast forward school and university one I literally learned nothing at and the latter where I lived in the library as I have done through a large portion of my life, and still do seeking solace comfort and ideas from past and present masters of the painterly realm.

Trying to fragment thirty plus years of being a painter into a statement as this is no easy task. To ask ones self an explanation of the interior and exterior of the human condition I refer to as painting.

I paint because it’s absolutely mandatory not obligatory that I do. There is no running and hiding from it.  Images colors shape lines sizes faces words among mind rumblings are the catalyst and makeup of my works. From the abstract to the figurative and everything in between implore me to expand or deny via my canvas charcoal chalk pencil acrylic or oil pen.

My mission is to try and convey life and the fragments it scatters into paintings whereby I turn feelings words or the muse of the day into a visual narrative that fetters and breaks our human condition or conditioning. 

My work is never easy and at times after a visceral attack on the canvas I am left exhausted mentally and psychically. I leave shards of myself, the viewer all over and beneath paint charcoal dust and pencil scrawl with intent.

Every painting I hope conations small or bold vestiges of hope visually for, as we all know hope springs eternal and for me that hope is and always will be my paintings.

— JODY MC GRATH