Work in progress

Feelings

Solo show April – May 2017 Town Hall Theatre Gallery, Galway, Ireland First solo show as a fine artist

Feelings is a solo exhibition of over thirty paintings on paper and canvas, shown at the Town Hall Theatre Gallery in Galway in April 2017, curated by Margaret Nolan. It was Finbar's first solo show as a fine artist. The paintings use colour to carry emotion — an idea that began on the beach, where a group of stones looks uniform from a distance but reveals, up close, a different colour, texture, and shape in each one.

The works are named for the emotions they sit closest to — Heart Ache, Joy, Heart Opening, Remembering, and others. The show is arranged in three parts. It opens with the Stepping Stones — a sequence of eight paintings that track Finbar's shift from painting inside the lines to painting outside them. A middle section gives room to look more slowly. A back room holds the most direct paintings in the show.

The paintings are a record of learning to paint without control — of letting colour lead, and treating what it arrives at as truthful rather than as a mistake.

Through spending lots of time in nature I would often look at all the stones at the beach from a distance, but when you take the time to look at them more closely, you would see all the different colours, textures, shapes — and recognise that while we are all human, we are very different internally.

A selection of views from Feelings at the Town Hall Theatre Gallery, Galway.

Over thirty paintings on paper and canvas, arranged in three parts across the gallery — the Stepping Stones at the entry, a middle room for closer looking, and a back room of the most direct works in the show.