The Good Friday Paintings 2006 Following the example of Tony O'Malley (a well known Irish Artist from Callan Co. Kilkenny), I decided to do some Good Friday paintings .... although not very religious, I have taken the cross as a symbol ... there are all types of different crosses ... all sorts of crosses people have to bear ... reaching a cross roads in life etc. This Good Friday I produced 3 smallish mixed media pieces (pastel, pencil and gouache), then a rather large acrylic on canvas (which is not finished yet). If there are any artists out there, perhaps we could get together next year on Good Friday (or work from our studios), with crosses as our theme ... then exhibit the results... just an idea!

"Crossroads" 12 x 17cm (mixed media)

"Tormented Way" 19 x 25cm (mixed media)

"Never again" 19 x 25cm (mixed media)

"Restless Peace" 125 x 105cm (Acrylic on canvas)

Tony O'Malley (1913 - 2003). Many years ago, he called into our home in Ireland, Co. Tipperary, while cycling past with his wife Jane, he came across as a gentle kindly man, Jane was clearly his soul mate, an artist in her own right. In the early 1960s, O'Malley began one of his best-known series of pictures, which he continued until the late 1990s. Painted every Good Friday he painted mostly the theme of Christ's passion. These ranged from Wooden Collage, Good Friday (1968), a strikingly simple evocation of the Crucifixion in blackened fragments of wood and slate, to Good Friday Painting (1994), which bears the expanded repertoire of gesture and colour resulting from his visits to the Bahamas in the 1970s and '80s. When interviewed on TV he said he started these painting as there was nothing to do on Good Friday, apart from go to church, as all places of trade and entertainment were closed on Good Friday in Ireland ... "you couldn't even get a drink on that day" .... this, as far as I know, still applies in Ireland.