Last week we sat down with our current exhibiting artist Daniel Donnelly to talk to us about his current show Gravitational Geometry; The Method of Movement and Attraction

“My history with Art goes back many years, I found myself in a place called The Coach House Trust where I drew, wrote and played music. Five years down the line I came across a prospectus for Anniesland College. I sifted through the contents to find Art and noticed an NQ course in Contemporary Art, I signed up.

Five years later I have come out with a BA Honours in the practice. I have had good support to do this over time and I remain thankful for all of this.

The story of this exhibition will come under the title of Gravitational Geometry; The Method of Movement and Attraction. There is a big relevance to this title as it sums up the stages of the craft that I am looking into and the merging journey that I have frequently travelled over the years.

Put simply the work was inspired by a feeling I had about a personal need to be grateful for studying great artists, writers and philosophers whom I have encountered in books throughout the years. The portraits are involved in a slow and almost uninteresting motion that was to represent my feelings about their influence upon me, I think that these feeling are evident in the pieces almost as a mood.

                           Friedrich Nietzsche – Oil on paper, 42cm x 59.4cm

To brighten the darkness of my portraiture I have also over the years involved myself with geometric patterns. My first work therein was to complete 40 hand folded booklet full of unique and varying patterns and colours. An observation I made was in seeing that there is a vast amount of variations within this kind of work. After making several of these booklets I began to acquire a knowledge of particular form set down by my pencil and brush.  These booklets were small, the size of a CD cover. The next natural thing to do was to create images selected from the index books (as they have been referred to by fellow artists) and enlarge them up to 120 cm wide by 60 cm high canvases, each with their own pattern and colour. I refer to them as ‘colour to portrait’ and ‘colour to character’- for example the red coloured pattern I chose to go with Freud to represent his erotic ideas, and so on with each character’s famous idiom.”

Daniel is planning on touring with his current show after Six Foot and is planning on applying to a Master’s Degree in the new year as he “is ready as i can be”.