statement

John Hanrahan

My painting is about visual memory. Family, landscape and memory are significant motifs in my work. I want to make my work a link to our inner chain of experiences, to recover memories, to re- live experience. The recurring images in my work are filtered according to my own personal experience.

In painting, I have always been attracted to the constant interaction between ideas, image, mark making and the contrasts between areas of intensity and areas of empty space, painting figuratively seeking to explore the balance between form and meaning.

In my art, I use multiple layers of paint, adding and removing, sanding back the surface revealing passages of pure mark marking. Letting chance create areas of interest. I then try to preserve and protect selected areas, continuing to work and re-work the image until the painting is finished. For me the act of painting is a visceral experience. Works are conceived abstractly and evolve through this process of mark making, trying to make visual, human experience. Recently I have begun to incorporate found images such as family photos in my work and hope to develop this further.

Reaction to music project late 2008

I have always felt that Irish music when played at its best courses through the veins of the listener, the notes, melody and decoration, encouraging the listener to respond almost involuntarily. I can only envy the musician and assume that the feeling within the musician is far more intense.
When I heard this beautiful piece of music, this came to mind and I seized the opportunity to take my work in a new direction. I wanted to make some work that connected the music with the heart.
The work I have made is a series based on tracings made from a beating heart the tracings are similar to a musical stave. This similarity to a stave was the first visual point of interest. I organised a tracing of my heart and scanned the image and then began to experiment formally with the image using the music as inspiration.