Trigger - Liam Daly: Process

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"I stir the paint with an old chopstick,

watching it ribbon back into the thick glossy blue."

"borrowed light"

   a short story by gabrielle grace
inspired response art
   by liam daly

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I read the given story, "Borrowed Light" by Gabrielle Grace, as I would read any written piece i.e. with no particular intention of creating a painting from the experience. So after reading it I let it sit for a few weeks and fester. Images of paintings by Matisse entered my head, rooms with windows, light pouring in. Then I read the story a second time.

Triggers for me are mostly shapes. They can be of spaces between objects, of shadow, of animals, but I see everything in shapes.

"Borrowed Light" is quite a sensory story, at times very visual. As a painter I'm very much focused on shape, so shapes in the story hit me. A round room, a round chair, a dining table, notebooks, a television, an imagined parasol and swimming pool. In my head circles grew into rectangles.

When I paint I frequently do so in bold colours, often garish, and combined in ways that fauvists would not have been shy in doing. In the story of "Borrowed Light" colour features strongly, albeit mostly in the form of filtered light and shadows, and evolves until there is the literal application of paint in the story itself - that of the shade of the eponymous "Borrowed Light", a sky blue.

In my figurative work a shape I paint more than any others is that of birds - mostly starlings on wires but also rooks, eagles, and abstracted forms, sometimes in flight, sometimes perching or walking. In the story an image of a hawk is used, and then a pigeon, with the pigeon being preferred.

I'll often paint objects or figures in paintings solely for the purpose of painting over them, often until the surface would give no clue they were ever present. It's like a back story, a memory for the painting itself, and visually I like the idea of absences - e.g. I am especially drawn to walls where a window might be, maybe even once was, but isn't.

So I painted a succession of concentric soft circles and rectangles on top of each other, decreasing in size, so they blended into a blurred lozenge, using the colours in the order they appeared in the story, until I finished in the centre with the eponymous sky blue of 'Borrowed Light" surrounding a pigeon and a painted over absence (a hawk? a person?).

The finished work is not a painting of the story (nor intended to be) but a painting triggered by the shapes, colours, and some of the main features that form the narrative until a certain point before the final resolution. In some ways the painting is quite literal but that's how my brain works. On another day it might have been triggered into an even more literal approach of painting a scene like the gorgeous interior at the beginning or exterior at the end.

The painting is on a wood panel, 12" x 15". Six different brushes were used in creating 8 layers. ___________________________________________

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