Drawing more inspiration from the stormy night skies here on the Dingle Peninsula, planning and beginning to sketch out my first *official* collection of paintings

The abstraction and colors in my paintings are inspired by what I observe from my life here on the Dingle Peninsula, like last night’s stormy sky rushing toward the Blasket Islands on the wind’s chariot.

My newest painting: Roimh an mBailc I tried to convey the visual equivalent of a sudden drop in atmospheric pressure—that tense, electric silence where the salt-spray hangs in the air, the coastal winds suddenly drop, and the world below simply holds its breath, waiting for the inevitable strike.

My newest painting: Ag Sú Chuige (Drawing in/Gathering). When locals here on the Dingle Peninsula look at a dark sky building on the horizon, they say “Tá sé ag sú chuige”––the sky is gathering itself, sucking in the moisture, swelling up and preparing to release.

Another breaking wave, another moody sky. I can’t seem to shake how water possesses me, mind, body, and soul. Perhaps my own tidal strangeness gives me a yearning kinship to remain forever close to the wailing crash of water against stone. I have yet to break the spell. I hope you feel it too. 🌊💙

excuse me 👁️👄👁️

The biggest tell I’ve spent the day down on the beach is a peek in my sketchbook later that day 🌊 trying to capture that kinetic action of the roiling foam and the heartbeat of the surf

Stormy foggy cliff mornings, the blues call me like a siren, the Blaskets hidden in distant mist

Obsessed with the atmosphere and clouds from this past stormy Sunday twilight 😍

On an almost impossible mission with a phone camera this morning. Instead I settled on photoing a beach at the bottom of some treacherous cliffs that I'd like to explore. It’s the climb back up I am unsure of 😅 so I have yet to attempt. Caspian was along for the adventure, best hiking companion 💙

Thinking about her (the ocean)… and abstracting ground planes 😂 Some of the cliffs around the Dingle Peninsula that I walk

Me going out into the absolutely madcap storm weather to photograph this sunset over the Blasket Islands, yelling over 40 mph winds trying to knock me off a rickety balcony: “Oh, come on!!!”

Watching storms roll in and out of the Dingle bay from my studio skylight, listening to the howling of the wind and the birds delighted to ride the 32 kmph currents. Perfect painting weather 😍 hooks me right into this place.

The rain is pouring down the peninsula, the sea roars, the wind is whipping 32 mph around my upstairs studio/apartment. I am warm in bed, may have finally figured out the method I am after (a many months long journey). Some in-bed sketchbook experiments/quick sketches lighting me up. Perfect day 💙

Today was medium testing day. My go-to testing color is always Anthraquinone (Indanthrone/Delft) Blue (PB60). It makes its way into every last one of my paintings, so it’s a good gauge of whether I like how a medium works, or not. Do you have a go-to color or tool?

“Learn the pain of creating something. And once you’ve learned it, resolve yourself to show lenience to others. In poetry, in literature… in everything.” -Chihayafuru (season 3, episode 2) This is another thing I love about art. We become more wholehearted through the striving. 1/3

My kind of art and creativity is always an iron fist wrapped in a velvet glove, as is any other form of rebellion that I embody. It may not be loud or wearing a leather jacket, but it will effectively and slowly create the change it envisions. 1/3

This is one of the reasons I think art matters so much: art is one of the ways love becomes visible. And perhaps that is why the whole thing can feel so painful when blocked. We are not merely missing a hobby! We are missing a mode of relationship. amayarourke.substack.com/p/what-we-ca...

I wish I could get paid for my biggest talent in life, which is overthinking and therefore painting myself into a conceptual/philosophical corner Whomst amongst us will pay me to keep hitting myself thus

Can you imagine Jeff Buckley trying to get anyone to pay attention to his absolute masterpiece, Grace, in today's world where music generally only picks up if it's 3 minutes or less? Would he have even tried to make it? Can you imagine a world without Grace in it???

So foggy and salt water-swept that I can't see the house in front of where I live 😍 dreaaammmmyyyy

And then 7 months later... I live here 🤯

Hello, yes, I am alive! I moved to an itinerant waypost on the Dingle Peninsula where I now paint everyday... which I dreamed of for 5 years 🤯 Social media feels strange when real life feels good, so I have no idea how much I'll be around here. For now, a sunset over the distant Blasket Islands:

"I am in the right place at the right time." #HeronMindfulness

I love that somehow I squirreled some paint away months ago, totally forgot about it, and discovered it like lost treasure this morning while looking for something else 😅

Sharing paintings with a fellow painter and just absolutely swooning over each other's work >>>>>> 😍😍😍😍😍

Jane Austen's Mr Darcy was a Heron. #JaneAusten #Literature

Saw someone upbraiding someone else for having a hobby while the world is on fire, and, my friends: 1. The world is ever on fire, this is today's conflagration; 2. If you don't find time for rest and joy the fire will consume you; 3. Don't let people shame you for being an entire human.

❤️‍🔥🙏

Amazing how changing my focus toward something I 100% love and feel zero conflict towards doing, makes me more okay to be seen/known again. 100/10 on aligning existence with your values, highly recommend

Back on my bullshit where I intensely long for the sea with every fiber of my being, waking, sleeping, and everything in between And here I thought that tide had receded

On my mind this morning... It truly is bizarre

SWOOON @racheldeering.bsky.social did the heron ask you to marry her after this?

"We labor at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life because to us it is even more necessary not to have leisure to stop and think. Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from [themself]." - Nietzche

My little avian metalhead 😍😍😍

The last time I experienced this was in 2017. I was living near Carrick-On-Shannon (Ireland). A local man ran something similar to a musical thrift-shop with old instruments, 1000s of records + cassette tapes, books about music. He made tea and chatted with us for 3 hours. It was pure magic.

Can scientists stop trying to reanimate extinct animals from bygone eras and instead figure out why we get barometric migraines and how to stop it? <--- I passionately whisper from a pitch black room

“In a poem Gibson wrote shortly before they died, titled “Love Letter from the Afterlife,” they wrote: “Dying is the opposite of leaving. When I left my body, I did not go away. That portal of light was not a portal to elsewhere, but a portal to here. I am more here than I ever was before.”

Andrea (Andrew) Gibson's death is hitting me like a ton of bricks 😭

Impatiently waiting for The Art of the Boy and the Heron to be published 😤 It's the biggest "Art of" book produced so far by Studio Ghibli, since it's Miyazaki's most personal work to date! Digging deep into the evolution of Miyazaki's work is a personal passion of mine 😍

“The Otherworld is also much closer than we think; it... seeks relationship right where we are. It doesn’t care if you feel unworthy. All I know is that some of its tendrils live in myth, poetry, ritual, and the wild...” - A Branch from the Lightning Tree, by Martin Shaw

“Nobody really wants to live a productive life. We want to express ourselves, connect with others, and explore the world. Productivity is just a means to those ends; it should certainly not come at the expense of actually living life.” -- the book Tiny Experiments by Anne-Laure Le Cunffe

Woof the way this one hit 😭❤️‍🔥

Let's be honest: gushing in brazen detail about art and media you love reciprocally is a 10/10 type of friendship

Is there anything more vivifying than unabashedly falling in love with something new and being ever more delighted by what you discover?

Headline: these two galaxy clusters are about to bash into each other--again 😱🤯💀 My animistic little brain: what if they're just falling in love and that's how they kiss and new stars are born? 🤩😍❤️‍🔥✨

When a used book has the good paper inside: the kind with a distinct fiber weave, a thickness with no faint ghost of print from the opposite side, and the print itself is beautifully inked and pressed, faintly indented, into the page, and the whole thing has a certain pleasant, old-timey smell 😍🥵

A continuation that made me go ‼️ "Hence, anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when the spirit wants to posit the synthesis and freedom looks down into its own possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself." - Soren Kierkegaard

Chewing on this today, that anxiety is the possibility of possibility rather than any true actuality: "[Anxiety] is altogether different from fear and similar concepts that refer to something definite, whereas anxiety is freedom’s actuality as the possibility of possibility." - Soren Kierkegaard

Throwing it out there that we need more gardening emojis. Aphids and spider mites are the most common gardening pest complaints, and yet nary an emoji in sight for us green thumbed nerds. Petition for ~at least~ an aphid emoji, they be out here eating everything and I'm tired of typing it all out