VIDEO

Here is a transcript for everyone who can’t understand this Irish guy ;-)

This painting is called “New Year’s Eve Berlin (After Whistler)”. It’s like a diary through Berlin for about three months, or more. It took about three months, three and a half months from start to finish to do. 

It is like a diary through Berlin because it has all these energy lines underneath it. There are all these energy lines here. Then I was chatting to someone about it, and they thought I said “enemy” lines. There are loads of enemy lines in Berlin as well, you know, there are loads of them, so in a way, it’s like “energy” lines are “enemy” lines.

There are crane structures here, there are piles of structures underneath this area here, but I had to paint them all out because it was just too busy. And then one day I got a big lump of cardboard like this, or wood, and I put chunks of paint on it, and I dragged it all underneath, and I thought that would finish it, but it had to dry for weeks, and it didn’t finish it, it wasn’t... 

Anyway, I painted all over that. The whole idea of it, it’s like eh.. 

It’s dark, it’s winter, and then you are in Germany. Germany is all structured and controlled, and you have all these structures everywhere. Then all of a sudden New Year’s Eve comes, and they all go mental, they go mad like. It’s like a volcano, and I wanted to get the feel of that. It explodes. The whole city explodes into craziness all together...just... I’ll get back to that in a minute..

But I think these roundy brown things here.. It’s a real brown. It’s a nice brown. It’s like chocolate, dark chocolaty brown. And that’s eh.. There are a pile of trees in Berlin, a pile of forests here like, so even the way you have all these lines and everything... you have a lot of woods like... And loads of times I painted over it again, I must have painted it all dark, and then I repainted it. 

And I think because of the fireworks I started doing these volcanoes. You can see these volcanoes here. I did these in January after seeing, after being here in Berlin for the fireworks and that. And all these structures are in the painting as well, all these kind of dark blue structures that things hang on. And all these fireworks came into it as well, all these...

So really what it is is - but I didn’t intend on doing this - when you are painting you have no idea what you are doing, but now that I see it, I see tall buildings, I see structures, I see electricity lines, I see enemy lines, I see cranes, I see like trees softening the whole city. The trees soften it. I see big activity underneath, and there is just all this like mad, mad, mad explosions really. And that kind of sums up my time in Berlin so far, I think...