"The secret garden". This work was incited after a drawing that my son Odhràn made. He was, like all kids of his age, battling with the application of drawing in school. One day he told me that he was useless at drawing. In investigating his reasoning I realized that he was confronting the problem of imitation direct of an image. I explained to him that drawing was not like writing where you are obliged to give a form a fixed resemblance but more to do with expressing an imagination. It was after this conversation that I decided to work with him in the development of personal expression with all that it initials. He became more relaxed with the idea that he could do what he liked with the image content. I would pick up images that would interest me and incorporate them into my own work. Some times I would only slightly change them and other times I would juxtapose several images together to make one. The above image is of those I changed very little from the original draft. The whole sense behind the work was already established, "The secret garden". Here we see a personage in a heavily protected garden, smiling happily in the surroundings of flowers and space while at the same time jousting with a sinister pirate type figure who is threatening a forced intrusion. Within the garden there is another closed space, in which I placed the object of all convoitise, the hart, which must be protected vigorously in view of its fragility. I also placed an directional arrow pointing towards the invader in order to emphasize the direction in which the movement of things should take place, from within to without, if one is not to be submerged by the onslaught of external influences. I couldn't help thinking that this innocent image depicts the circumstance in which we all have found ourselves in at one time or another, that is of course personal identification. We all know what and who is in our secret gardens.
