Donal Moloney

Notes from artist talk:

Visiting Lecturer (Donal Moloney):

• Showing work from art school – finding one thing you like and then just approaching it from different angles from the rest of your career
• Making the objects to be painted rather than relying on direct observation/photos
• Key artists, texts and research then figured out through the work
• Painting the rain – the landscape taking part in its own painting
• Relying on black and white – didn’t know how to use colour
• Between abstraction and figuration
• Etching into wet rabbit skin glue
• Finding lots of new marks – throwing into waterfalls
• Reading artist interviews (not reading a lot of critical theory at the time)
• Morris Louis – colour field artist – stained with acrylic paint – ingrained within the canvas/embedding in/a compression – not sitting on top of a primed canvas – new gesture and mark – letting the paint make its own marks
• Small collages, biro drawings as contrasted to the large paintings
• Importance of materiality – the alchemy of a gesso ground as opposed to others etc
• Stretched outdoor canvases and they seemed very aged and weathered/worn – layering, scraping back
• Bringing different narratives in
• Not planning out but instead about the process and reactional
• Start with a problematic thing that you try to solve (e.g. a giant ear made into a mountain, breaking up a space and building from this – getting lost in the story, allowing images to come in and out of the painting)
• Simon English – subtle and suggestive, alluding to a story
• Colin Crotty – taking images from photos and painting them the exact same scale – a lot of this semi-abstract, process-led work at the time in Ireland (mid 2000s)
• After degree show, started looking at the stuff he enjoyed most – the detailed sections
• Compressing these collected images together, building up until resolved
• Also playing around with collage, photoshop, breaking down initial meanings – not wanting to be too kitsch or twee
• Working a colour at a time
• Then realised he could make his own images using Plasticine – not having to rely on found imagery
• Making ‘maquettes for sculpture’
• Ellen Altfest Green Gourd – primarily paints from life, male figures or natural forms – ‘an intense scrutiny and myopic focus’

• Sometimes work that you like comes in unconsciously, you don’t have to select something and intentionally bring it in
• Going over the top with photoshop – bringing a digital effect to painting – liquify tool ‘makes an image look like paint’
• Allowing humour into the work
• Changing the model kind of allows you to reach right into the photo and change it
• The process of painting led him to weaving
• Two year MA – first year messing about
• Diagrammatic woven paintings – painting out woven images and scrunching into a form to then be painted
• Projecting digital imagery onto sculptures (then build up paintings from this I think)
• Untitled = you’re not really sure what the work is about (and that’s ok)
• (has he ever thought to exhibit the sculptures? Why mediate through painting?) – subject and object getting confused, answer and question simultaneously – they’re only good from one angle – they often become fragments, falling apart and used again
• Jeff Dennis

• Animations projected on sculptures – vibrant and psychedelic
• Slow down and work on one painting for 6 months and see how dense and claustrophobic it can get – still procedural, also a sense of gestation?
• A narrative of a figure having just left, an assembled mass of stuff
• Trompe l’oeil paintings with a flat/shallow picture plane
• (missed the name of the painter but someone painting cellophane – incredibly narrow picture space)
• Clement Greenberg’s Modernist Painting – painting should be flat
• Leo Steinberg The Flatbed Picture Plane – letting culture back in, a dumping ground for information – throwing things in, editing them out
• Norman Bryson essays on still life painting
• Also dutch art, Svetlana Alpers’ book
• Didi-Huberman Confronting Images – a detailed element that acts as an interruption – e.g. white specks of highlights (links to Simon’s lecture and the Ingres text)
• Reliquary – from inside a cave looking out
• Cave Floor – a density of information with narratives coming out

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• Can’t take it all in at once
• Idea of narratives continuing outside the edge of the painting as the image is filled edge to edge
• Painting paintings on top of each other and sanding back through them !! – bring in an element of surprise/rediscovery – collaborating with yourself almost
• Book called the uncertainty principle
• Don’t think of your degree show as a full stop! (maybe more of a comma)
• Reflective surfaces to create space outside the picture plane