There’s something inspiring about how Irish creatives have responded to lockdown in the last 12 months. All around the country people who might have been stifled are instead producing works of art, and beautiful crafts and products for the home. And what can lift a room more instantly than a pleasing piece of art?
Take Michael Holden in Kilkenny for example. At the beginning of the pandemic he was head decorator at the well-known Nicholas Mosse Pottery where he'd worked for 41 years. Last August, he left his job to set up his own business painting landscapes onto ceramics, inspired by the views around his home village of Inistioge. He says he's now fulfilling a lifelong ambition to blend his love of painting with his skills as a ceramic artist and will be creating a range of products. To begin with he's working with ceramic tiles. He paints scenes onto a tile before applying a transparent glaze. This is then fired in a kiln at a temperature of 1,100 degrees for nine hours. The finished piece can be mounted in a frame or used on kitchen and bathroom walls.
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Artist Monica Jones, a contemporary mood painter who lives and works in Baltimore, west Cork has moved from realism to abstract work over the course of the last year. She found lockdown an intense experience, mainly due to separation from her children, family and artistic muse, the west Cork landscape. Not having studied her work since art college in the mid-1980s, she signed up for a painting masterclass with renowned New Mexico-based artist Gwen Fox during the first lockdown last April.
Covid-19 and the masterclass pushed her outside her comfort zone, she says. “This gave me the confidence to trust my creative intuition and almost without noticing I found I was travelling down a path to producing abstract paintings after spending my entire career up to this point rooted in realism.
“Even more profoundly, I found the different processes required to produce abstract and realistic work complemented each other and crucially helped me gain and maintain momentum as a working artist.”
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The impact of lockdown encouraged furniture and lighting designer Leo Scarff and his team to launch an online shop, selling products directly to customers.
"We have wanted to create an online shop for some years and are very proud to launch this new platform for our work," he says. Scarff has been a creative designer for over 25 years, studying and working in Dublin and across Scandinavia before setting up his own studio. The company's workshop is in Glenade Valley in North Leitrim and their materials include Baltic Birch Plywood. Business has taken off since the pandemic began, helped by the launch of its online shop last September.
"For this we gathered together a collection of products which could be shipped easily, and we designed labelling and packaging for each one," Scarff says. "The new site has opened up the world to us for our products."
leoscarffdesign.com/shop
