OnTheTown: Using plastic bags instead of brushes to paint "gives you a complex, chaotic surface", explained Desmond Shortt before his show, Tales of Innocence and Corruption, opened at the Ashford Gallery in Dublin this week.
In using this technique to paint landscapes, he added, "I was looking for something that had gusto and was more in the tradition of rock'n'roll music than in the tradition of classical music".
With plastic bags, "instead of getting controlled paint, you slip all over the place . . . I wanted something that was sparky", explained Shortt, who is from Cahir in Co Tipperary.
According to Noel Kelly, deputy director and curator of Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, who opened the show, Shortt "embraces the fantastical landscape of medieval and Chinese tradition. His figures appear to float in these imaginary worlds". It's as if these figures "transcend any attempt at definition" and "embrace their own qualities of distance, displacement, and sensual abandonment", he said. "There is a sense of wanton abandon," Kelly added. "This is a world of imagination, a spirit world filled with the dimmest of dark and the sweetest of sunrises."
Among those at the opening were Shortt's girlfriend, Londoner Michelle Normanly; artists Bruce Campbell and Jackie Stanley; Rita Hughes, of Hughes & Hughes bookshops and musician and artist Daniel Figgis.
Tales of Innocence and Corruption is at the Ashford Gallery in the Royal Hibernian Gallery, 15 Ely Place, Dublin 2, until Thur, Sept 22