A. Donnelly - The Vagabond Painter

vag·a·bond - adjective : wandering from place to place without any settled home; nomadic.

Why vagabond?
Beyond it just being a cool word, if there is one thing that has characterised both my life and my artistic journey, it’s an inability to settle in one place. Be it my physical home, my own identity or an artistic style, always there exists the urge to move on, to change; to do, see, be something or someone different.
For years, I tried to find ‘my’ style, the thing that would mark out a painting as being one of mine. I’ve come to realise that this is never going to happen. The chaotic whirl of influences means that there’s always something new grabbing my attention, pulling me in a new direction.
I look at a Vettriano painting and want to do something that looks like it came from film noir; I see a work by Voka and I want to paint with wild, vivid colours. The same is true of every artist I follow on Instagram - they paint something cool, I immediately want to do the same.
The only constant is the desire to capture the essence of a moment, the character behind a face, the feeling of a place or a time, even as the style shifts with my mood and my own perception of who I am.
So who am I today? the reserved, somewhat self-conscious person who likes to do nice landscapes? Or the exuberant, fluid, extrovert who wants to cover a canvas in blazing hues of pink and green?
I don’t know yet, and tomorrow it’ll probably change

And somewhere in the background, the theme to The Littlest Hobo starts to play.
Maybe tomorrow, I’ll want to settle down…

A.