COVER TO CANVAS ARTIST OF THE DAY – Colm Mac Athlaoich, Visual Artist, Illustrator and Educator

Colm is a multi–talented artist working primarily in illustration, painting and print to create his unique art with a definitive style. He works across many themes and influences such as landscape and architecture, people, music and colour. Colm manages to take all of these influences combined and make his work very much of the moment.

The title of Colm’s piece for the ‘Cover to Canvas’ art exhibition is To Each Cow Its Calf. Colm tells us about his inspiration…

I arrived at the idea for this piece after much debate and consideration. After my visits to The King’s Inn Library I was struck by the beauty of its collection, in particular the craftsmanship of the book binding and decoration, artefacts of a bygone era where the book was a cherished object. I was initially drawn to the Library’s 1542 copy of the Magna Carta, which later led me to research the significance of this book within the context of Irish History. As a result I rediscovered Irish Brehon Law, which was maintained by oral tradition and practiced before and after the implementation of The Magna Carta, as recent as the 17th century. Another item from the collection which interested me was the book ‘Studies of Ornamental Design’ by C.J Richardson, a sort of trend forecasting design book for the 1850’s. As a printmaker I wanted to reference the skilled engravings of this publication in my piece. In order to bring these separate elements together I chose part of the text from a Brehon Law relating to copyright “To each Cow its calf, to each manuscript a copy” and surrounded this text in the botanical illustration from CJ Richardson’s Ornamental studies.

WANT TO SEE COLM’S WORK? COME ALONG TO OUR EXHIBITION. TO LEARN MORE ABOUT COLM MAC ATHLAOICH’S WORK, PLEASE VISIT HERE.