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Ignotum per ignotius… a salient aspect of the Dailies is their anarchic overthrow of the power of the word and of pictorial representation. My favourite comic Harpo Marx likewise overthrows the pompous and the wordy. He alone remains visually aware while all about him are so busy talking and thinking that he can cut off their hair, their cigars, and their braces and glue things to their clothes without their even knowing it. What l do is l take newspapers and l fold them, tear them up into beautiful curved folds and ripped lines; l staple them to the board to reveal the layers beneath the surface, glimpses of inner spaces and of peek-a-boo fragments of pictures, dissolving the images into inky colour and the printed word into visual patterns — even the staples holding it all together become visually active on the picture plane. The spirit of Harpo’s irreverent ‘Gookie’ (tongue lolled out in a fat roll, cheeks puffed out, and eyes popped and cross-eyed) were in my mind while l was composing it. It is an homage to the primacy of sight and to the child in all of us. (A note to The Irish Hospice Foundation on the donation of the Daily, A Gookie for Harpo ). February, 2014. Daily-Gookie-for-Harpo-v2-170x200px

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At the age of ten I became fascinated by the fact that I could see everybody else but could never be seen by myself. I sensed somehow that in some odd way I was only ever seeing myself.When I was about seven or eight my mother first allowed me to ‘paint’ the back wall of the house (with the large brushes from the shed) as long as I only used water instead of paint. I used to see the wall changing over and over again while I waited for it to dry out so I could do it again and again and all this with my mother’s approval. This arrangement thrilled me and I can’t remember it having ever ended.At about the same age I understood that a fly, a horse and a human were made of the same stuff. I discovered this when imagining myself falling from the same relative height as a fly falling from the mantelpiece. The fly survives the fall, but I would be killed. By various experiments, funny to look back on now, I came to the conclusion that I was simply more fly-material and therefore heavier than the fly. These flights of imagination, testing ideas by experience, became a creative technique and an essential part of my art-making method. It was while I was recently painting/making an arbitrary colour collection, gazing at the colour/paint in a reverie, that I remembered similarly gazing through the hole in the bridge at Emmet Road, (over the Camac river) at the dyed water rapidly passing by from the paper mills upriver. The water looked blue or pink and sometimes green or yellow. This place became like a friend… with its own promise of excitement.Dublin, 2006. 2012-08-24-14-37-150x200px

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When I was fifteen I left home under a new name and age, and for four months (from November of ’62 to March of ’63) I lived as Michael Grendon, twenty years of age. I trained to be a rifleman in the Greenjackets regiment at Winchester. I went AWOL with Mickey Ray, a prisoner I befriended. We went to London and go into trouble with the police. We were caught. He was sent to Brixton and later on to Portsmouth Military Prison. I got two weeks in the guardhouse and then back to training. I became best shot and Bren gunner in the platoon. I was to receive the Crossed Rifles and Bren Gunner badges upon marching out. And I was picked to go on further training as a sniper. Two weeks before marching out parade my father found me. I was honorably discharged by Col. Shouldice, a veteran off the second World War, who said to me that I would make a fine soldier and I should consider returning when I was of age. I was in shock: as Michael Grendon I had opted to go to Borneo after training but instead I found myself as Ciarán Lennon back again in Dublin.Dublin, 1990. parade-ground-16-4-11-150x200px