Frieze Drawings and Phidias Paintings
The work of Samuel Walsh references his early Classical training in Limerick School of Art in the late sixties and a visit to The Elgin Marbles room in London’s British Museum in 2005. From a series of drawings of marble relief panels, Walsh evolved a fresh aesthetic by taking fragments of these drawings and enlarging their scale. A main concern of his work is to move between the micro and the macro, in turn reducing the representational aspect while increasing the aesthetic possibilities. After working in Pont-Aven, France in late 2005 Walsh was introduced to encre de chine (Chinese ink) and made a number of drawings with brush and ink based on small sections of details of the marbles, reducing the lines down to an abstract composition but more importantly a new identity.
Working from these drawings the subsequent paintings titled Phidias and Testa personify the combination of painting and drawing for Walsh, one of the essential aims of many contemporary artist-painters.