Shelly Mc Donnell

My current work could most effectively be described as abstract Landscape painting. The canvases are painted from memory, which inevitably communicates not an accurate depiction of a landscape but recalls the experience of being in and knowing a place. My work explores the idea of memories being at once romantic and flawed.

These are traits often attributed to the Irish: romantic and flawed. We actively market it to tourists. The colour and lines in my paintings are loyal to the landscape of Connemara on which they reminisce but I incorporate industrial gloss paint and stark contrast that remove the image from the traditional format of landscape painting and place them more in the realm of mass media, thereby presenting the landscape as a commodity. 

I mix deep base glosses with artist’s oil paint and apply to the canvas with large volume syringes. To better remember colour, form and impressions of certain times and places, I research memory techniques practiced throughout history from those used by Cicero to the more modern scientific method of mnemotechnics.