Peter McSweeney is a self-taught Irish painter. He works with oil pigments as it gives him a primal feeling of painting with coloured rocks on canvas. In this exhibition, he paints as though he is sculpting with varying shades and hues of blue and white paint in a fiercely energetic way that captures the raging energy off the  cliffs of the Seven Heads in West Cork.

 

Peter was born in Cork and grew up in Douglas. " As a child I loved going for walks in the countryside. It didn't matter whether it was the ocean, mountain or forest.Douglas was in the country then and wasn't as built up as it is today. So nature in all its moods and weather patterns was right at my doorstep.

When I got home I would draw the images from my mind filling up sketch books my father made available in constant supply," he remembers.

 

He graduated from Senior College Ballyfermot in 1999 with a Diploma in Classical Animation. He moved back to Cork after college and had a studio at the Art Hive in Cork city centre. It was there he met Jo Allen an American life-painter who introduced him to oils. He continued to experiment with oils in the following years while he worked in the computer department in University College Cork teaching 3d computer animation. He also worked in the folklore department editing film. Disillusioned with working indoors he went to work with his father in landscape gardening and established a studio in his family home in Douglas.Today he lives and works in his studio in Crosshaven, Co. Cork.

 

"I am fascinated by the natural elements, often sitting in remote locations for hours just listening to the wind howling or waves crashing against the rocks.

The constant movement, the energy in the elements never stops flowing; that's what I try to capture on canvas. That's what I discovered at the Seven Heads Peninsula. I saw the eddies swirling as the tide flowed in and the sea reaching through the blowholes and rock-faces. After that I saw it everywhere in cliff faces, on ice walls, clouds and in trees," Peter explains with great vigour and enthusiasm.

 

"I get the same sense of natural raw energy captured and stretched in some of the paintings of Gustav Klimt's, Albrecht Durer, Casper David Friedrich and especially the landscapes of Gottfried Heinwein. Capturing and taming that natural raw energy has become almost an obsession and will continue to inspire and motivate his ongoingdrawing and painting," he says with a mischievous grin.