Eamon Colman

 Irish Artist,

Member of Aosdána

Artist Statement

Over the past 40 years my practice has taken me throughout Europe, Africa, Asia and North America: I have walked to the source of the River Ganges in Nepal, white water rafted the Colorado River in USA where I walked with a native American Indian named ‘Talking With Rain’.  In 1999, I was the sole human resident for six weeks on the island of Hirsholmene - a Danish nature reserve located within the Arctic Circle.  These journeys or travels were ‘recorded’ in notebooks: places, stories, experiences remembered through sketches and texts - later translated through paint back home in my studio in Temple Bar or latterly in Henrietta Street, Dublin.

Since moving from my native Dublin to rural Co. Kilkenny in 2003 my inspiration comes from subjects and places closer to home. The upland area where I live provides a vantage point that enables great distances to be viewed.  Extending the vanishing point on clear days to include five counties, and on foggy days - the point at which one cannot see beyond could be a mere 3 feet.  This aspect of looking out across large expanses of landscape is juxtaposed with the more intimate and visceral experienced of walking a terrain - feeling it underfoot -    experiencing it through the senses by baring the elements.  Drawing on the weather as phenomena – living above the snow line as I do - the weather acts as a metaphor for what is both concealed and revealed; a veil of rain, an accumulation of snow becomes a conceptual tool that creates an elusive interplay between figuration and abstraction.