O'Carolan 2016

Joe Machine’s painting of the bard O’Carolan has a kind of naive, folksy touch, yet is made with an insider’s knowledge of how paint behaves. I love to think about how a painting comes into being, and what it might have been like to create this one. I imagine Joe, brush in hand, thinking through the arrangement of each figure. It is built up with rhythmic, repetitive marks that are almost hypnotic. Look at the lines on the tree trunks, they are like musical notations. I get a sense that Joe has built this scene incrementally, like a puzzle. It’s folksy, even visionary, but there is something that feels very raw and real. What is so interesting about painting is how one creative act responds to another across time, like echoes in a cave. It makes you think about where ideas come from, and how they morph and change as they pass from one artist to the next.