“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…
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 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”…
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…
I was to draw a card for a relative. We have a beautiful orchid that lurks greenly in a corner, and then pounces into a dazzling white perfection once every couple of years. How to capture such a pure, such a white, such a delicate thing? With my clumsy hand? Nonetheless, it became my subject……
It’s cold these days. Cold for June. For the first time in a long while, Irish people keep expecting a heatwave to arrive, like we’ve had in the last couple of years. And we’re unimpressed that it hasn’t happened yet: friends sit around and grouch about the cold. “We’re spoiled,” says my friend Lorraine, “this…
You know how it is – you put a proposal in for something, it gets accepted, you’re all “Hurray!” – and then you have to fulfill what you said you’d do. That’s me with my workshop in USk Amsterdam this year. Luckily for me, not only did the proposal have to be planned down to…
Sometimes sketchers visit other towns and look up the local sketchers. We meet for a drink or something to eat and do a bit of sketching together. Today Hélio Boto from Portugal visited Galway with his girlfriend Marlena, and it happened to coincide with a visit from Arizona sketcher Marylin French St. George. We were…