AWAY FROM THE NOISE
JEALOUS OF THE BIRDS THE SUNDAY PAINTER...
For most of my life I’ve flitted between one creative practice to another; writing poems and fiction, recording music demos in a bedroom studio, making short films and stop motion animations, sketching in crisp white notebooks, trying analogue film photography and so on. But I had no idea when I started painting two years ago that this medium would impact me more profoundly than the others Touring the UK and US pretty consistently as Jealous of the Birds over the past couple years has given me the opportunity to visit art galleries and exhibitions I just wouldn’t have seen otherwise in Northern Ireland. Those by Picasso, Maar, Basquiat, Rothko, Van Gogh, Krasner, Goncharova, Words and painting by Naomi Hamilton
Cézanne and others. Instead of having a vague idea of certain artists or paintings-- the kind we get from flicking through coffee table art books -- I was now having some kind of dialogue in person with them. Being receptive to the visual language of painting made me feel like a tuning fork just struck. My natural inclination when I see an art form I admire is to try it out for myself. I wanted to use this language in my own way, and so began my journey into being a kind of Sunday painter. There was a time when I first moved house that I had more raw canvases lying around than items of furniture. There’s a painstaking quality to painting that’s both frustrating and cathartic. You don’t get good fast, and many of my first paintings are testaments 17
to that. Every piece is a slow negotiation between the lessons you’ve already learned and the shortcomings you’ll undoubtedly face in the process. Because of this, I’m never more pissed off than when I’m painting. It teaches me to grapple with patience, humility and reinforces the joy I pull from making something out of nothing. Any creative process is only ever truly exciting when you’re met with some level of resistance. You need to feel the effort necessary to make a breakthrough. That’s what painting is for me: an endless mental figure-8 to set the neurons firing. Jealous of the Birds’ new album ‘Peninsula’ is out September 18th. www.jealousofthebirdsmusic.com
