Adrian Flaherty – Embracing the Accident

I am primarily a London based painter incorporating chance into my work in various ways. Either as a starting point as can be seen in Fish and The Bridge, or in spontaneous work like Bananas, or to create effects that are used to contrast against more detailed work in portraits and in the series I’m working on of bridges along the river Thames.

I use various methods to create my paintings but normally I use both water based and oil paint so that they generate textures as they `mix’ together. I then work details in to accentuate the chance happenings.

My website address is https://www.adrianf-home-works.com/ where you can see that I am contrasting home life which is more controlled and reasoned against work or the outside world which is a lot more related to embracing chance occurrences.

I graduated from Camberwell Art College (University of the Arts London) in 2016 with a degree in Sculpture since which time however I have concentrating on painting (mainly because it is space saving and I can produce more work). Over the degree course I was interested in ideas about the home and produced some work that was quite personal but some functional sculptures as well as I made my home more livable. My work particularly the Bridges series, as I walk along the south bank of the River Thames, are more about working life, being a south-Londoner, and how there is the need to make connections to others. So there is the link to consumerism as I try to sell my work and to make a living from art. Living in the city is a lot about chance meetings with people and events and the river is very much like the flows of people around it – very synchronic although it has been there in various states for a long time and has a lot of history to it.

I think my creative processes and ideas are very synchronic and they tend to evolve in the process of making. Aspects of my work are very quick to do and would be hard to recreate as they have a lot of variables – from materials to hand, the amounts of materials, costs etc to more personal factors like mood and events in my private life. Then comes the editing of the work which is often very time consuming- embracing the `accident’ often and finding out what the painting/artwork wants to be like. So I think creativity is very much about being in the moment but having a general plan about how to go about making the artwork.

Find Adrian here: adrianf-home-works.com