This personalised family caricature went all the way to the United States! It features the hobbies and interests of each of the family members and I worked from individual photos to create the combined portrait. Below you can see the framed piece before it set off the for States!
Happy Bloomsday! In late 2019 I was approached by Andrew Kelly of Wicklow Heather Restaurant and House in Wicklow about the use of my James Joyce caricature as part of the label design for their Bloomsday limited edition gin.
“About 10 years ago to the day we began collecting very rare books and memorabilia for our Writer’s Room which over time has turned into one of the largest collections of work of first edition Irish literature.
To celebrate the Writer’s Room we have distilled our own limited edition gin. The Gin’s name is “Bloomsday” which celebrates James Joyce in particular and his life.
When working on the label for the bottle I came across your caricature of Joyce for Bloomsday. I absolutely loved how quirky it was and instantly wanted to base our design around it.
We are producing a limited number of 200 bottles of the gin where the label will be prominent.”
It was so wonderful to be approached in this way and we worked out the details for the use of the James Joyce caricature. I think the resulting label looks great:
Anyone whose work is image-based will know how frequently other businesses will just use your work as a free stock image library so the Wicklow Heather Restaurant properly sourcing the image and working with the artist really meant a lot.
It really looks like an amazing venue and I hope to get up for a visit as things begin to normalise, and maybe even sample that gin!
Tobe Nwigwe is one of the most consistently creative artists working today, with a singular artistic vision only matched by the prolificacy of his output. He, Fat and Nell (and the kids!) have this unified aesthetic from furniture to clothing, and the Pandemic Project was an uplifting event at a time when everything was bleak. The whole family-centred approach to music and video creation is radically wholesome and is really inspirational, but there’s room for brooding and darkness in there too. I’m a bit of a fan. It’s utterly jaw-dropping how much music he’s put out in the last year. Did I mention I’m a bit of a fan?
This is a caricture portrait of Tobe Nwigwe and Fat created in Procreate for the iPad. I intend to do a series of caricature portraits to hone my digital painting. I’m quite late to the digital game so the learning curve is somewhere between a really large hoola-hoop and one of the rings of Saturn. I’m finding it a curse and a blessing, there’s huge time savings to be had but an amazing gulf conceptually between drawing on paper and drawing and painting digitally. It’s the long way to Carnagie Hall for the next while.
This caricature was a wedding gift for a wedding last year and was put on display for the arrival of the bride and groom! The bride is wearing a Kerry jersey, and the groom has a Kerry bandana around his neck. It features signposts for Shrone, Killorglin and Dublin. Also included are the Sunday Times, a pilates mat, a GAA football and references to other sports including golf, rugby, badminton, tennis and hurling. And a cup of herbal tea! In the background is a vintage wedding car with cans on the back and the bride and groom’s initials on the number plate with a loveheart.
Weddings will be back in a big way later this year so if you’re going to one and you’re looking for a really special personalised wedding gift drop me a line!
