Acrylic on Canvas

Most of my paintings are inspired by Nature and my proximity to the land, not just around where I live but  further afield in spaces that are a little less familiar.

Hares are just one of our Irish neighbours, inhabiting fields and grasslands  and coexisting with the practitioners of  21st century farming. These animals are a threatened species, endangered by the pesticides, chemicals and the methods of harvesting that are not totally sympathetic with the season and life-cycle of these athletic herbivores.

My first encounter with a hare was when i was about four years of age. While on a walk on the banks of the Shannon in Limerick, my father found a young injured hare and in an effort to save this one small life of a wild creature, he brought him home and looked after him until his leg which had been torn and scarred had mended. He allowed me to hold him and I can still feel the sinuous strength and wildness that was in that body. I can feel the hair and the desperate urge to run free. i can smell the earthiness and the scent of fear of this being which was in the alien space of human territory. He survived and my father released him back into the wilds of the banks of the Shannon at the place at which he had found him.

My relationship with hares is a curious and a mystical one. I admire their element of surprise appearance and their fleetness of foot. Of course the stories of Kitty the Hare by Victor O”Donovan Power in publications like Our Boys during my childhood didn’t go by without having imprinted a indelible mark in my psyche.  The hare was the animal that could shape shift and run in and out of this world and the next always trailing mystery in its wake

Horace Hare, one of my big paintings of this species is a self-inventing character in a fable which I hope to publish in the near future. He is a personality who likes to be painted, illustrated and recounted in various tales of life in the real world of nature close to the world of humans.

I wish to thank Andy Fisher, British Wildlife Photographer who in his kindness supplied me with copious images of hares when the same animals of Newgrange and the West of Ireland became camera shy and thin on the ground.