Hallo, and you're welcome to the website of the artist mick foley.
Who is a painter who was born in Dublin Ireland, though now lives in Celle Germany with his wife and some parrots.
This will be a short introduction to my work with a mixture of words and pictures, obviously.
Jazz clubs and fishermen
'At the jazz club' is about something I'm not, being a good dancer. It looks like a good time to me. A wild night at the old club. It was also a chance to paint people in extraordinary poses and all wearing thier best, with some in hats and cool sunglasses.
People sometimes ask, where do you get the ideas for your work, and I tell them that I go down the shops and buy them. A truth is that I listen to the radio alot while I'm working so a lot of things come over the airways so to speak. These paintings are called 'The ballad of the lost fisherman'. I wanted them to be about longing, what it's like to love someone and then to have them head out to sea maybe never to return. I like to listen to the shipping forecast, which is the weather forcast for ships, and to think about all those boats on the high seas in all kinds of weather so far away from dry land.
Lovers and the grey sea
This painting is called ' Goodbye lover' and has lots of things I like. Big city steets, dogs and a wild sky. I'm not such a miserable person in real life, but in my work there seems always to be a fair bit of melancholic pathos going on.
I grew up next to the sea. these are two pictures of the grey Irish sea
What I miss most now that I live inland is the way in which the sea wind really blows all thoughts out of your head
The big city
This picture 'by the old canal' is about people passing people by in the way that you need to walk in a big city. Eyes forward and with enough insouciance so that you don't look like a tourist.
This is about a street full of döner kebab shops. It's called 'Sufi street'
This very small painting doesn't really have a title, it's about the colour red and about going down the road to a chinese resteraunt
It's always a bit of an experiment , or a chance to experiment when I paint in such small sizes
Coffee to go
The everyday drama of people drinking thier cappochinos or skinny lattes on the street is great. This is called 'the flowers of Capitalism and is about the wonderfulness of such ladies. I'm in love with them and I like coffee too.
This next painting ' Cafe with Buddelia' is a hommage to a local Italian restaraunt which always has the largest of flower displays and lots of other kitsch on display.
This next painting ' Cafe with Buddelia' is a hommage to a local Italian restaraunt which always has the largest of flower displays and lots of other kitsch on display.
And this ' Cafe del'arte Madrid' is about the gorgeous girls who bring me my coffee. This time in a very famous cafie in the Spanish capital, which had lots of works of art including Pablo Picassos student life drawings. The waitresses were still the best though.
Hannover
Hannover is the next City to where I live, and it's good to jump on the train and to escape.These paintings are painting about that town. One is about the usual lovers drama, the next is an inner city building site. Then a city skyline at sunset with Hannovers most famous skyscraper very prominent. Finally a scene in the train as it arrives at the main central station.
The trip to the city takes about a half hour, with there being lots to see on the way . The best bit for me, being the fantastic urban dereliction all along the tracks coming in to the city. Lots of old industrial buildings going to rack and ruin. Some rather magnificent. The city itself though, being no great shakes.
The trip to the city takes about a half hour, with there being lots to see on the way . The best bit for me, being the fantastic urban dereliction all along the tracks coming in to the city. Lots of old industrial buildings going to rack and ruin. Some rather magnificent. The city itself though, being no great shakes.
Trees and the weather
Of course I like trees. Who doesn't? In particular I wanted to explore time when I painted them. A tree being a constant thing but one which continually changes throghout the year. Also there are those colours,I'd like to feel that the viewer would shiver with the cold rain or feel the need to take thier jumper off with the heat, be somhow a little bit one with mother nature And a tree is the largest living thing I've ever seen, another reason to be impressed. I hope that the people in the paintings enjoy thier botanical accompaniment.
The great indoors
Sometimes though it's just good to spend time at home. These two paintings are about normal domestic life, taking a bath and sitting around the kitchen table.
Mathilda queen of the pink moon
The works by the author Angela Carter have always impressed, taking the old folk tales and somehow magicking them so that they become so present, so alive. This series of goaches about a queen who had a hundred lovers and drove a taxi in India was like a stream of consciousness, where one picture just led to another, till dozens were finished. I must admit I didn't really understand what was going on half the time myself. The queen Mathilda had her own ideas and impetus and I just had to follow. Her Adventures being that much more exciting than my own everyday humdrum.
A bestiary. Dogs, foxes and pigs
A galerist told me that dogs in pictures represent chaos, and that when I include them in my paintings that I'm displaying my true Dionysian nature. I'm not so sure about that, I included a dog in this painting with the girls in thier bathing suits because I didn't like them being so vulnerable. Just leaving them lying about with hardly anything on, they needed something to protect them. I like to put animals in my painting so that the people in them won't feel quite so lonely. Foxes are for redhaired people like me the animal to which one feels most drawn. I toyed once with the idea of trying to breed a new race of pig, crossing a Tamworth with a Dresdener. Which was fun because I got to look a lot of pigs my favourite being the Yorkshire Middle White. Which can grow to a truely enormous size.
Pictures from home
The beaches at Bray and Shankill are the places that I would think of as the landscape of home. Growing up with the sea on the doorstep meant lots. Of all things a sense of space and a love of wind. And also a love of grey, the Irish sea not being one for turquoise pellucidness.More choppy grey waves with white horses. Bray being the nearest town, the esplanade, a seafront promenade, is a constant theme with it's decrepid old hotels and wheezey seaside jauntiness I always smile when I think of it
Drawing
I find that I don't draw nearly enough as I should. During my student years there were all those hours spent wrestling with the nude during life study classes which somewhat drove the pleasure out of things. Now though It's where I can let rip somewhat. Unfortunately most of the drawings I produce are as studies for paintings on canvas and end up on the floor of my studio, where thier fate is to be stood upon. But sometimes I do just draw for it's own sake. These ones here were all done because a Bookbinder gave me some Fastastic sheets of colourful paper and I couldn't resist them
The artist
Born in the National Maternity Hospital Dublin in1969 in the same room as James Joyce and Sinead O'Conner I then studied painting and print at art school there. Moved to Germany in the 1990's where I work as a Freischaffendenkunstmaler (free producing art painter) and Dozent (Teacher) of art in the local Volkshochschule ( peoples high school)
