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"Music is God's glue, it holds the Universe together." |
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This is how Maurice Quillinan describes the soundtrack to his creative practice—a philosophy that extends to his entire approach to artmaking in his Limerick, Ireland studio. A Space Born from Lockdown Quillinan's studio came to life at an extraordinary moment in history. Completed on the very day of Ireland's first Covid lockdown in March 2020, the 8.5 x 9 meter space rose from the ruins of derelict sheds, transforming what was once forgotten into a sanctuary for creation. With large skylights overhead and no windows to the outside world, the studio becomes a place where, as Quillinan puts it, "time doesn't exist." "When I close the door it's just me and the dogs and the work and music and no phone," he explains. "It's the best place in the world just to concentrate on painting and drawing." The Daily Ritual Quillinan's day begins at 7:00 AM with coffee in the studio—not to work, but to assess. He prepares brief sketches the evening before, giving himself a starting point for the morning ahead. After praying the psalms, he begins his actual work, deliberately avoiding emails and social media until he's made meaningful progress. His process is one of simultaneous creation. Working on four or five paintings and drawings at once, he treats each piece as part of a larger conversation, applying successful marks or colors discovered in one work to inform the others. "I consider painting as another form of cooking," he notes. "One has to develop each passage separately in order to bring them all together at the same time in the end." But perhaps most revealing is his description of what happens next: "I generally just sit in an old office chair about nine feet away from the canvas and simply stare at the painting as it stares back. Sooner or later one of us blinks and the arm wrestle begins." He references a Muppet Show sketch where a character tries to outstare a tree until the tree collapses. "Sometimes the painting will let you in easily, sometimes never. You get to read the signs in the beginning and know that whatever I do things just won't work out, so I throw the canvas out." Drawing from the Landscape Quillinan finds his inspiration in the wild beauty of Ireland's west—the local River Shannon, the Guinness canal in Limerick, and the Burren National Park in County Clare. The unpredictable Irish weather, especially the wind, makes larger plein air work impractical, so he creates tiny oil sketches and drawings on location, later developing them into larger studio works. The Philosophy Behind the Practice For Quillinan, art is not about abstraction—it's about deeply observed reality transformed through memory and experience. "I believe that my responsibility as an artist is to create visual experiences based upon the viewer's history of experiences," he says. He describes himself as "by nature a repetitive mark-maker and a reactionary, rather than a planner," someone who must be totally immersed in a subject for it to resonate. Through countless hours of careful observation—mainly using charcoal on large sheets of paper—he builds what he calls "experiential muscle memory," a foundation from which his paintings emerge. "There is no beginning or end," Quillinan reflects. "Art is a visceral activity of looking and responding. The work evolves from work." |
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