Artist's Statment - Bart O'Reilly

My current method of painting began with a series of television drawings that I made as a third year student in NCAD. I used moving images from television to generate a series of line drawings. The resulting drawings and subsequent paintings often had the look of paintings produced by artists involved with Abstract Expressionism. The concerns however were quite different. Rather that trying to produce autonomous works of art as they did, it was important for me to establish a link between the paintings and their original mass media source.

I made a series of paintings with the help of a video projector. Taping various programs from television I then projected the moving images onto the surfaces of the paintings. Picking a particular colour present in the footage I began to paint what was happening in real time. The tape was played through and then rewound. Another colour was then selected and I started the tape again. This routine proved to be a very rewarding process by which to build up a painting.

The work came from a wide range of televisual subject matter. A documentary on The Second World War, The Simpsons, Formula One car races were just some of the programs that I chose to paint from. I am interested in the difficulty for both artist and viewer when it comes to dealing with a particular theme or set of ideas for any sustained length of time. One of the main concerns in my work is the difficult and elusive nature of meaning in contemporary visual culture. I also wish to continue exploring the relationship between painting and other methods of visual representation.