I've always been addicted to paper, its texture and the most basic and primitive markings possible with a piece of burnt stick. I'm most inspired with a few sheets of rough brown paper, charcoal and the endless effects achievable with these and washes of Indian ink.

My Moleskine Artist's Notebook I titled "The Narrator" because like many I love a story, the narrative of a life. It meanders through a Kerry childhood of lakes and mountains.

My Grandfather Joe O' Connor (1877-1957) was a writer. His book Hostage To Fortune, first published 1951, was his autobiography and a social history of his times.

Much of my childhood was spent at his home surrounded by books and the background sound of his old Imperial typewriter as he worked on his manuscripts.

This Artist's Notebook is of recollections from this childhood, school years and then a scholarship to The National College of Art. Following on to the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence to work in the studio of Primo Conti. An Italian Government Bursary brought me to Scuola Statale D'Arte in Urbino and the discipline of etching, working with Professore Renato Bruscaglia, Master Printmaker.

It was as it turned out a logical progression from the academic drawing from the figure in the College of Art to the discipline of copperplate etching in Urbino.

Linking with this learned technique is the progression of collaborating with the measured work of poetry and poets. Their

ability to so minimally describe a thought, a feeling, is essentially what the painter attempts in searching to record the unadorned idea.

"A Woman and Landscape " Marja-Liisa Vartio (1924-1966)

'And when the green bark has slid by the red one,

 when the furrow of the green bark

has melted into the red furrow,

all lines break up and make a circle and with red tongues,

panting, they chase each other.'

I decided not to deconstruct the Moleskine but to introduce new papers and textures in a concertina fold-out format. Drawing in charcoal and soft ivory pastel on Japanese paper that unfold from the notebook, you get transparency and structure. I used this in creating a fold-out stage set to link with a reproduction of " Empty Stage " a theme in various media. One of these paintings was used as the cover image for the Dedalus Press publication To Ring in Silence, new and selected poems by Paddy Bushe. The Rilke poem The Panther I've used for itself and it's recording of the suffering of animals for our entertainment, the millions of horses and mules caught up in war and in the food industry the live transportation of horses and cattle for slaughter.

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