Sean Carver

He comes from Cork and good Lord only knows where he’s heading. What really matters is that on his way he produces a great deal of darn good art. Sean Carver has a creative force to be reckoned with.

His work is technically paintings but it does go way beyond the paint & canvas sort of craft. Most of his pieces are built up over months and years in a process of reinventing and reinterpreting their initial form and meaning. I have happened to photograph some of his paintings thinking of them as elaborately finished artwork only to have Sean bringing them back in a couple of months for a reshoot – one would have an extra sketch subtly enriching the background, others would be changed beyond recognition, some of once independent pieces puzzled together to form an entirely new entity. As Sean puts it, it’s about “working in layers until I hit on something that sits right with me. Each piece is developed through the process of notebook, photographs, media experimentation and paint”.