Kerry O'Hare,Painter
I will always distinctly remember the day I got my first packet of markers. I was about four and I was fascinated with the colours. I bled them dry, I used every drop of ink in them. I still feel that way now about colours - when I go into arts supplies shops to buy paints I get butterflies in the tummy.
When I was small we lived in Lusaka, Zambia, and every now and again colours from that time crop up, flashes of fiery reds and burnt umbers. Later we moved to Blackrock in Co Louth, so I grew up beside the sea. It feels like the colour and the light of the place is bred into you, in a way. When I go home at weekends it strikes me every time.
I did a foundation course in art in Belfast. And then, partly because my grandmother was English and I had this romantic idea of living in Cornwall, I went there to do my degree in fine art. I was very young and I don't think that I understood the concept of homesickness. The experience nearly put me off painting for life.
For the next 12 years I didn't lift a paintbrush. Then I was asked to give a painting to a charity auction for an advertising industry benevolent society. Since I started painting again a lot of it has been abstract. I keep sketchbooks and sometimes you spot something in a drawing and hone in on it.
I work in a busy PR department so I paint after I come home in the evenings. I try to do something every evening. If I don't do something for a few days I miss it. I work mainly in acrylics because I like to work very quickly.
I've done everything from 10cm sq to a piece that was six feet by four feet. I loved doing the large piece because a physicality comes into play when you're stretching your arms and literally throwing yourself into it. There's always a bit of yourself in every piece.
To get texture in my work I use a medical scrim, which is a bandaging material pre-dipped in plaster of Paris. I also use textured pastes, some of them have ground-down volcanic rock in them. I get excited by textured work and I would be reluctant to put my pieces behind glass. I would like the idea of people being able to touch them.
Contact Kerry O'Hare at kerry.ohare@gmail.com