Martin & Tom's Alternative Christmas Windows in Limerick, Ireland.

 

Limerick based Signwriter Tom Collins & Cork based Painter Martin Finnin will come together for a series of 'alternative Christmas Windows' on the 23rd and 24th of November. All proceeds raised from each of the participating business's collections will be donated to two Suicide Prevention volunteer groups.

The locations are as follows:

Canteen Mallow St The Sage Cafe Catherine St Bean an Tí  Little Catherine St La Cucina Centro Henry St The Hunt Cafe @The Hunt Museum Hook & Ladder Sarsfield St. Niki O'Connell Montessori School A.M.I Tom on the project: ‘We hope to produce these playful very original windows using silver leaf, liquid chalk markers (all donated by A.S. Handover!) and temporary paints, with methods Martin and I honed over our years of painting Christmas windows when we were starting out. All these pieces will be carried over two busy days by the two of us and some guests stars!! We are making the Artwork freely available to anyone ( especially schools etc ) who want to create their own versions and help raise funds for their local charities.’ Tom is a signwriter based predominantly in Limerick. Mostly painting signs for shop fronts and business across the city, Tom also works on fine art gilding projects with well known Irish artists such as Dorothy Cross, John Shinnors , Tina O'Connell , Neal White & Eoin Barry. Last year he organised the Love Letters from Limerick Project that took place last year - a series of events that celebrated the art of traditional hand lettering and sign writing. The events took place in Limerick through the month of September, ending in an auction of created works in aid of Corbett Suicide Prevention. Martin is an Irish artist living and working in Cork, and who is represented by John Martin Galleries in Sloane Square. Apart from a stint as an apprentice bee-keeper and a tea boy on many London building sites, he has been working as a full-time artist since he had my first show in a gallery in Mexico aged twenty. Martin: 'To me the creative process is a perpetual flow of recurring opposites that dance around some elusive core for the duration of your existence. I have to work, then sit still and look. I have to absorb, fill up and then find a way to disperse it all. Putting paint on, wiping it off. Adding and subtracting. Seeing and forgetting. Wondering and knowing. Breathing in and breathing out. I am an artist because I can’t do anything else. I am happy to be working with paint. If someone took the paints away I would draw. If I couldn’t draw I would end up playing around with a few chairs, rearranging them or breaking them up. If that wasn’t an option I might take a whizz on copper sheets just to watch them turn green. I paint to make sense of the world. It’s a way to get rid of all the information, all the stuff I pick up every day. It’s not cerebral. It’s just functional the same way it is functional to sneeze.'