2nd part of making the stone piece



In Spanish art there is a strong use of colour than I believe you don´t see so much of in  Irish painters and sculptors.The light in Madrid makes me want to use more poppy colours like  lemon yellow which works well with the sandstone. Last March we went to the Thyssen with a few friends to look at the permanent collection and I saw these Romanic ..... sculptures in stone. I think they have a great immediacy to them , something very contemporary about paintimg a type of gloss enamel onto stone although they´re almost eight hundred years old. 



I have been trying out a few different colours but keeping a limited palette, I tried staining the sandstone a little with sculpting clay but in the end I washed it off again.I have already painted the flowers white a few times with gouach and again  washed it off. I'll get there eventually. In the end I just added a strip of lemon yellow on the sides of the stone slabs. 



The center and two outer parts of the sculpture are clear cast resin with bird shaped aluminium forms and beach stones embedded in side. Again thees resin pieces involve a lot of sanding and polishing and are finally mounted on a wooden support structure and pinned into place by wooden dowls. 

I bought the cut stone slabs a million years ago in Kilkenny for another piece of work that I ended up completing in wax and another addition in poured concrete. But this design was the original idea for the stone pieces, I just didn´t have the experience to carve the form at the time. Over the years here in Madrid and a practice run in plaster gave me enough time and effort to eventually complete this work. although at the this moment the work is not not completely finished. It won´t take much to finish it but there are still a few rough spots. 

Untitled - Dimensions   (H x W x D) 107 x 153 x 24 

 Medium   - sandstone, clear resin,wood & objects.










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