Daily Life

January is awful, weather-wise, and this year is no exception. However I’m cheering myself up with a good bit of sketching. Technicolor in Neachtain’s After a long gap, Urban Sketchers Galway ...

I saw this TED Talk the other night, and I had a few thoughts that I’d like to share with you. Joseph G-L seems like a very nice person, and ...

30th December 2019 My students are so full of enthusiasm for sketching in 2020 that it has inspired me in turn, so I am making sure my sketching kit is never ...

Christmas Eve It’s Christmas in Kilcolgan, in our little corner of windswept west of Ireland. On Christmas Eve my daughter Liv and I went up the road to the ...

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 ...

“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 ...

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. ...

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 ...

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 ...

Nimmo’s. the River Corrib and Spanish Arch 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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Clapping in the Connemara Coast Hotel Last night I made a trip to Connemara in the company of Breandán and Colm from my Ciorcal Cómhra (Irish language conversation circle) in our ...

Every Tuesday and Thursday I go to a small country town in Galway where my daughter does Taekwon-Do. There’s not a huge amount to do there. I can go to ...

My dobok Until yesterday, I couldn’t have sketched my dobok, the white uniform you wear when kicking around in a taekwon-do session. But I hurt my hamstring doing a flying high ...

Before we left the house to go to town this morning, I picked up my orange bag that I carry all my sketching stuff in. “Are you bringing that?” asked my ...

I was stuck indoors today: I have a chest infection and a broken, well, bum (see yesterday’s post about a flying high kick in Taekwon-Do that went wrong). Sometimes you ...