A Christmas Shopping Safari One crisp, cold winter’s night a few weeks ago, in Dublin on a sketching trip, I came to the end of South Anne Street, entered Grafton Street and was confronted by a vision of festive loveliness that made me catch my breath. The Christmas lights had arrived, and the street looked…
“There are 35,000 people coming in and out of University College Dublin every day,” my colleague Michael Brennan told me the other evening. Michael is a book salesman, and is in charge of selling my book, An Urban Sketcher’s Galway. He came to Galway last week and after we visited a few bookshops to do…
I have just returned from the beautiful medieval city of Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain, where I attended the fabulous Compostela Ilustrada sketching event. (Warning: this may be an envy-inducing post, unless you cannot abide rain, in which case you will be very glad indeed that you did not attend.) The old part of…
Back to the barbershop to sketch. One of the reasons I love to sketch there is that because I have done it so often I can try out new things. We all tend to revert to our natural way of making art, whether that’s recording every detail or just firing down one squiggly line, and…
I have wonderful friends who live nearby. We get together a lot – walking our dogs, swimming in the sea – and we eat together a lot too. Life is too short, as we all know, so my good friends and I make the most of the beautiful countryside where we live, and when there’s…
I think of people driving through my village Ballinderreen on their way somewhere. Ballinderreen is not usually the destination, being a “blink and you’ll miss it” village, with little more than a crossroads, a pub, a fuel station and a small shop…on the outside. But take a left at the crossroads and you will come…
I was telling my girl Liv about my book sales. “Is it a bestseller?” she asked. She knows it is, but she also knows I like to say it over and over again. She’s kind. “Why yes,” I said in an animated, interview voice. “”Now that you happen to ask, it is.” The little terrier,…
Back from Amsterdam last Sunday. Dublin Airport and a Citylink bus at 9.15pm. A Dublin cocky lad gets on the bus and asks the bus driver his name. Says he likes to know the name of his driver. Driver says his name is Butter And Cream. Cocky lad doesn’t miss a beat, says “thanks Butter-and-Cream”…
The 10th International USk Symposium has just wrapped up. It took place in Amsterdam, in the Netherlands. The 9th USk Symposium was held in Porto, Portugal, in July 2018. One of the organisers, Nelson Paciencia, stood up to say a few words about the experience during the introduction one morning. “The Symposium is not about…
This year, I brought my family with me to the Urban Sketching Symposium. It provided a nice balance between work and relaxing. My family is unusual in that we occasionally have rows over stupid things, and the searing hot weather meant rows over stupid things were a little closer to the surface than normal, a…