YOTA 
Artist is residence,  Roanoke City S.E.





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Welcome to
Studio Articulo


A work shope where Artists help Humans Confront Their Humanity

Brian Counihan

I am an Irish artist and educator located in Virginia.
My studio is part of ArtRatStudios which offers performance and event space for Avant-Garde events and performances.  

Community.      Ideas.      Support.        Often Absurd.

Apocryphal Texts at Alexander-Heath Gallery. October 2020.

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Apocryphal Texts

Alexander-Heath Gallery, Roanoke VA. 2020

A “Non-Career” Retrospective Exhibition.
Conceived as a student engagement project, students worked on all the artwork in this exhibition. The objective of this project was to inspire students to take risks and find the courage to make mistakes while learning & explore a variety of materials, media, and many approaches to art-making. The work is mine though, in which  I reflect on major upheavals in my life and in our world .

Bellow are thumbnail images of each work.To view the work of this most recent more thoroughly click on the galley tab above.

Yellow Bus to Arles

Garden of Earthly Delights

Silicon Age Collapse

Virgin Migration

Rapture Cloth

Word Made Flesh

Innocent Until Proven Guilty

William King Center for Art & Culture. Abingdon, VA. 2013

These are life sized silverpoint portraits that were regenerated from thumbnail mugshots printed in  “Crime Times”.  Each subject had their mugshot taken upon arrest and, before they were convicted or exonerated their photos were published with their names and arrest citations.  Silverpoint was used as a drawing medium n to draw Princes and Scholars, and I wanted to restore some dignity back to the subjects by using this medium.  These works are not for sale but  will be presented to the subjects of these portraits. In respect of their privacy I did not keep a record of the subjects names. Please contact me if you wish to claim one of these portraits.

Disorderly Conduct on Hospital Grounds

D.U.I.

Reckless

Violate Protective Orders Profane Threatening Language Over Public Airways

Felonious Assault/ Malicious Wounding Attempted or Display Firearm in Commision of Felony

Concealment Price Alter Merchandise

Driving With Suspended or Revoked Licence.

Probation Violation

Ordinance

Pepco Gallery, Washington D.C.   2011

Ten Years After: Artists Respond to the lingering effects of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The drawing “Augury” 30″ x 60″  is graphite on Rag Paper.,featuring a beer drinking “bird man” and a cowering “eggwoman”.   “Ordinance” consist of ten “shells” made from shredded student essays mixed with wood glue, and cast in 2 litre soda bottles (which in itself is a kind of weapon). The “shells” are mounted on wooden vase stands sporting jockey markings and a cross at the head.  They are uncomfortable and ambiguous objects for me : are they earplugs, weapons, sacred textual scrolls, game-pieces, specimen jars, reliquaries or cenotaphs?

Augury with Ordinance

Ordinance deployed

Jerusalem Shell

Jerusalem Cross

Greek Shell

Maltese Shell

Orthodox Shell

Star Shell

Augury

Paraphernalia of Pilgrimage

Olin Gallery, Roanoke College, Salem, VA. 2010

This work began as abstract paintings that  celebrate painterly surfaces, vibrant colors and offered the aesthetic challenge of resolving long triptych compositions.  They evolved, quite unintentionally, into narratives- some fractured and troubling while others evolved from memes and mythemes  waddled  into cryptic  tales. The narrative is a hook, but the process (many canvases were painted over five or six times) was the real pilgrimage. The “history” of every painting underneath the painted surface both informs the image above but also creates an undertow  of liminal spaces for the imagination to explore. Click for exhibition catalog.

Acteon

Sorry Route

Saturnalia

Daylillies

Oedipus

Tyger

Veiled Series

Lynwood Gallery, Piedmont Fine Arts Center, Martinsville, VA.  2009

These are a series of “Implied portraits ” painted  in oil on canvas.  16″ x 20″ heads and 30″ x 40″ three quarter length veiled portraits.
My painting process could be described as “seeking” rather than “depicting”. 
Initially, theses paintings were exercises in painterly mark-making. As they began to reach resolution each suggested a veiled head. I  allow myself not to fully understand or conceive the thing  and I seek a queasiness and uncertainty in my work because that is the place were we have the room to contemplate interesting questions.  Do we want to view art that reflects ourselves back to us- or how it makes us feel about ourselves? Do we go through life seeing things outside ourselves or do we basically seek ourselves in others?

Weekdays

Absent

Mother and Child

Blue Tee

Yellow Tee

Friday

Transitions

Millstone Gallery, Fincastle, VA. 2005

When I moved to Virginia from Chicago in 1999,  I was surprised by the number of people who took pride in their Irish ancencestary- a “Scot’s Irish” ancestary that celebrated a combination of Scots and Irish heritages  relatively untroubled by Catholic and Protestant distinctions. I grew up in an Ireland where those distinctions were made painfully clear. These painting attempt to blur those received distinctions-  fairy tales take a dark turn and mythologies crash, tumble and burn. 

Bríd’s Inspiration

Bríd’s Milk

Bríd’s Mead

Red Riding Hood

Goshenite

Jade Ring

Epiphany

Penelope

Deposition

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