Peter Healy
Enniskillen, Ireland
2 Works exhibited on Kooness
Current location
Houston
Represented by
Works by Peter Healy
Peter Healy is an Irish artist with a background in illustration.
These days he works in series and also individual paintings, drawings, and assemblage. His mediums are oil paint, acrylic, ink, pencil, collaged fabric, assembled wood and various 3d objects and paper. He tries to let ideas come to me and sometimes let the pieces speak to me through their creation using editing as part of the process. They are usually colorful and often try to illustrate the contrast of living in the sparsely populated Fermanagh countryside of his youth, and living in the city with a diverse population.
A lot of the time the shapes in his paintings and drawings are like characters or individuals trying to coexist in a space on canvas or paper, just like we do in cities. In some series he is with the viewer looking through a window or down a tunnel at forms floating in space. Sometimes the shapes go off the edge; he wants the viewer to think “What's around the corner?”, much like we all wonder what’s around the next corner in our everyday lives. He is interested in relationships between the objects he makes, movement, landscapes or environments, composition and space.
His assemblage work is all about collaging 2d/ 3d forms. A lot of the time its about reusing wood and material to give it a second life. It’s like making a jigsaw puzzle whilst inventing the pieces. When hurricanes happen there is so much material ruined. He wanted to find a way to reuse it and mix it with drawing or painting. It also gives him the opportunity to make unusual shapes.
In general, he always loves getting lost in paintings, so he wants the viewer to do the same. He wants to make work that takes people away. The landscapes he looked out across over the years always make him think of the road ahead, distance not yet covered and the possibilities for the future. He tries to emulate that feeling in his work.
Peter has lived in Ireland, England, Amsterdam and Los Angeles and now calls Houston, Texas home where he lives with his wife and two daughters. These experiences and diverse populations have influenced his work. There are so many ways to represent population architecture and nature, that he is constantly going between mediums to describe these relationships.