Did you Support Your Local Art Workers?

Galway city was magical during that December-time madness when everyone empties their pockets into the luxury goods market.

Glorious

Did artists in Galway take advantage of this money-catching frenzy? Why yes, yes they did.

I took a wander through the city centre on the 18th of December to take stock of the most obvious efforts of Galway craft-makers to sell to the seasonal shoppers. From a market-perspective this is totally relevant to my art business-critiqueing study. Think of it as a art-market-permeability and accessibility assessment and as a chance to showcase my super vintage fun times with Pixel-o-matic.

First off, the Christmas Market:

Hip border, vintage and sparkles makes every lame camera-phone photo better.

I remember a lot of bobbly scarves, wood carvings and soap.

My favourite part of the Market were the cute illustrations of various market sponsers - hotels, restaurants, etc, - on the Christmas Market barriers. So simple and so charming.

Generic Galway Cornerstone Merchant

 I have no idea who did them but I'm going to go ahead and imagine it was Proof for now, seeing as how go-to they are for all manner of grandiose design work in Galway. 

 The Saturday market down by St Nicolas's was operating during weekdays on the run up to Christmas. To my delight it was bursting with artist stalls. Galway city's 70,000+ population was simply spoilt for choice. Diana Piavorova and Chris Murray were the two that enraptured me the most.

Peter McManus the Framer and artist-promoter can be found at the market promoting the vivid expressionist  landscapey work of several artists in postcard, print and framed form. He has a gallery known as Blow-in Galleries that is currently...websiteless..sigh.

Some properly mad fine art for unsuspecting shop street shoppers.

The most visible artist in Galway city has to be the one who has their own spot on Shop Street. The only time of the year that Bryan BAM Chisholm seems to share this en plein air gallery space (acquired after about 8 years of determined art squatting) is during the Arts Festival, where caricaturists, facepainters and hair-bead-braiders perch beside his permanent easel display. During the season, he was breaking out the abstract, the surreal and the ever-popular Samuel Beckett portraiture to strike gold and lure more Galwegians into art patronage. Because it's really really in vogue to be "working on" a website rather than to actually have one, here is a nice biographical video made about BAM and his work, and here are the photos from one of his indoor exhibitions (where I got to part ways with 20 euros for an earth-toned still-life).

I was proud of the smattering of private art galleries that had their doors wide open this end-of-December. For the Vanda Art Gallery I feel the most protective of and emotionally invested in, being a permanent gallery business run and stocked by one artist - yes, an artist - in one of the most expensive areas in Galway to rent. I also love how commerial Vanda Luddy has made her "Ronseal" art - iconic Galway postcard scenery picturing everywhere from the university to the Claddagh, in a clear, uncomplicated style that indicates yes you are definitely buying an artwork, you can even see the pencil lines and brush strokes, but you are not going to be challenged or art-elitist-ed out of the room in any way. Simply can't get more accessible than this.

Another artist who runs the Galway Art Classes (well done of your super high SEO for "Galway, art"), Jim Kavanagh, rented out another unit in super-rent-street for a few weeks to sell his very Irish, very likeable and ultimately sellable dramatic landscapes. All boxes ticked for a good Christmas art gift - lets hope his work now appears in everyone's auntie's sitting room.

I have to say I am the most proud of this instagram-ing. I swear to the muses I am talented.

Here are two galleries in Galway I've had my eye on for a thorough nosey adventure and a hearty bit of gallery-owner interviewing: Obsolete Gallery in the Eyre Square Shopping Centre and Galway Bay Galleries off the illustrous Dominic Street. Both were in full swing for the Christmas season:

Showcasing their Day of the Dead exhibtion earlier this year. Photo nicked from their expertly-utilised Facebook page.

Galleries with massive graffitti art influences does things to me. Speaking of which Finbar247 had an admirable and highly successful Christmas effort to rake in the dollars.

 Also a word in for Funky Fairtrade in the Bridge Mills. A notable amount of Galway-based craftspeople sell their absolutley gorgeous, squeee-inducing work in this year-old enterprise. Again their Facebook page does more justice to their product display than my camera phone ever could.

Photo also acquired from Facebook page.

 Also it was here that I did my part to Support Your Local Craft Workers this Christmas, an economic cause close to my heart.

Pendant featuring my favourite High Cross by Jack Roberts - Bandia Jewelery (weirdest link to an artist's contact details yet).

What did you do?

Tulca Visual Art Festival and the Outsider

Tulca and their logo have this really attractive urban, scratchy, film-reel feel to it. It's a good representation of my Galway winter; nostalgic, foreign and exciting in that urban way and cosy.

I feel like going to Tulca is mostly a formality. It's cultural and it's high-brow and I love art exhibitions and meeting enthusiastic artsy people so much but...I get the sinking feeling that it won't light my artsy fire. That I'll be dissatisfied. Another cynicism bomb dispells. Mostly because, besides giving in to my basic artistic tastes, I am always on the look out for two more things when I peruse a visual arts festival;

1. Public accessibility

2. The triumph of young local artists over the recession and over Art-World conventions

It would be totally unreasonable for me to suggest that the creators and instigators of Tulca didn't think to represent these in their festival. In fact, they did; I read the curator's piece in their programme. They're doing this whole theme of Landscape this year, which I am all over (as long as it's urban, of course, otherwise it's figurative art all the way). However I will be mercilessly hawking out the festival for the various gradients of these two factors, because that's my pathology. And Tulca is a fairly traditional and publicly funded arts festival and is not going to be nearly as accessible for the public and and youth-art-innovating as...my...dream arts festival...would be...

I'm approaching this with the gait of a real outsider, who has a measured interest in art and art shows, but is unfamiliar with any of the artists or the conventions in place. But who, all the same, knows what she wants.

Tulca Artists I'm looking forward to:

• David Helper
• Louise Manifold
• Lisa Malone
• Elena Nasanen
• Emily Richardson
• Daniel Seiffert
• George Shaw
• Dee Walsh

For all of the artists I searched whose name did NOT immediately pop up in google with a catalogue of your work; you should be thoroughly ashamed.

All of these artists feature the following tags – cities, decay, technical work, nostalgia. That's my melting pot of art-awesome right there. As beautiful as a Brazilian. As for the other artists in the festival, the descriptions in the lovely free booklet either didn't sway my interest or were far too dense and honestly, I got incredibly bored reading them. I'll let that speak for itself, really. I'll stay open-minded because art is great the way it does that to you and I will report back if I discover an absolute diamond in the rough.

In the artists I've chosen to get excited about, they feature visual art and photography. Not much video installation or sculpture.

I gotta say: I'm not big on video installations. They just don't do it for me. I appreciate video installations in this very forced and pained way, like I how I would react to one of our many aging relatives in nursing homes across England telling a mumbling, long-winded, dithering story that certainly has a lot of personal and historical importance and wisdom but invokes no interest in me whatsoever; “Oh, that's nice. That must have been a challenge at the time. Ooh. Obviously a lot of effort went into that endeavour. I appreciate your attempt to communicate with me and probably try and teach me something.” etc.

Of course I have my own wee gripe and bias about video installations being Versus-with-a-captial-V public accessibility. Video installations, along with performance art, serve as those very broad generalisation stamps that immediately give the elitism and hipster-ism labels. This of course isn't fair but, alas, public relations are public relations and artworld tropes are artworld tropes (can't wait until I can get into researching the meat of this reality, a la Sarah Thornton and her Irish equivalents).

Aideen Barry is an Irish performance artist who is really fucking cool and fantastical, however. She opened the ArtSoc exhibtion in 2010 *smug*.

I am already itching to do some gallery-hopping (oh the bliss) and I am also pining a bit for my amateur Galwegian artists and art admins who are as of yet undiscovered and un-art-festivaled and who lounge dejectedly in their mouldy semis exhaling pure gaseous Potential (one of the principal elements on the Artist Periodic table. Yes I will make an infographic of that) into the atmosphere, which I bottle and then breathe in surreptitiously at night time underneath my duvet.

The opening night itself was yesterday, I got some photos on the old camera phone, and had lots of wine like I had hoped.

Two pieces in particular stood out at the opening reception:

This is just mad.

It was all a bit too networky for me now BUT I was quite thrilled to be able to introduce a few people from various arty sectors in Galway too each other. It's always very encouraging to see art students from the local art school not clinging to each other and hudding in a ball of social awkwardness and seeing them chatting to that local youth art group that get a shit-ton of local funding or the to the various organisers and art show instigators. Yep. Great when that happens.