Surf Talk in Sligo

I just finished making a poster from an existing painting. Oceanographer and author of Surf Science Tony Butt is coming to sligo for a 2 day seminary:

The focus of the lectures will be loosely based around the material contained in his book, including: the formation of low pressure systems, the generation of waves, the propagation of swell, wave breaking, tides, water temperature etc. and a fairly comprehensive treatment of wave prediction (what most people want to know about).

New board!

This is my new toy. I took a while to get completed, with some changes of mind and design in the process but I finaly got it in my hands. I got this made with the help of board shapper Paul Smith from www.glidesurfboards.net -well he did it all really, I only supplied the picture for the back.
I took it out for a couple of runs this weekend and last week and all I can say is that she is definitely attracting attention. The board also handles very well in hollow fast surf which was a surprise as my experience with other fish boards was theat they were best in mushy sloppy waves.
Anyway, she looks sick and I'm delighted with it.

Poster for the Galway surf club

This goes back a while, but I made this back August 08 for an charity even run by the Galway Surf Club. The Painting was used for their poster and given to the Galway Surfclub for them to offer as a prize in a raffle they also ran on that day.

..and here's the poster with the finished painting.


The Galway Surf Club made a small video montage of the event. I dind't attend myself as the waves were breaking big and strong in Fanore that day :-)


I always wonder who won the raffle and painting. If you did, please do send me a mail.

European Fish-Fry 2009

Finally, I finished this painting this week. This will be the poster for the upcoming European Fish-Fry festival that will take place in Lahinch (Ireland) this coming September 09. I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out as well, I used inspiration for the central surfer from a previous painting I'd done a couple of years ago and I wanted to add small bits of what makes the Fish-Fry such a distinctive event, so I came up with that "film strip" idea on top of it, with what I'd only describe as "standard Irish surfer moments" :).


Here's a small strip of the whole process. I first come up with a small sketch on paper which I then straight away convert into a marker drawing directly on the frame.
As you can see one of the boxes at the bottom was eventually removed as I thought it cluttered the painting too much and would anyway disappear under the text once the poster is done.
The last image is a massive reducton in colors in order to get t-shirts printed for the event.

Found this on you tube a while back. I re-uploaded under my name to make it easier to find for my friends & family.


I got roped into this by complete accident at the lorient festival. From what I remember I got a text late at night (round 2/3am) while playing at a session at the Pub Glen in Lorient, saying that Theresa Kavanagh was short of a bouzouki player.
I can't really remember saying yes but the next day we were rehearsing for a gig later in the evening. As it turned out it was good fun. Thanks ye all.