Johnogradyart-You-are-Everything
You are Everything, ©John O’Grady
15.75″ x 12″ oil on deep edged Beech Panel, ready to hang and doesn’t require framing

SOLD

Sometimes when making a painting where the vista stretches off into the distance, I imagine walking through the landscape in my minds eye and feeling the terrain underfoot as my brush or knife makes marks on the panel.

It may sound bizarre but it gives me more of a sense of place and connects the feeling with the marks I make.

This painting is about special moments of quiet and solitariness standing alone in the bog in the Wicklow mountains and feeling and hearing the wind whistling by. I have never been to the bog at night but, as I was walking through and painting the golden bog grasses, I thought about how they stretch away far into the distance in their thousands and thousands and how when we stand in such a landscape, we are connected but oh so small.

This led me to painting the night. where our sense of solitariness can be often more pronounced. When we raise our eyes, though, we feel instantly at one with the heavens and its myriad of stars as much as with the land and its thousands of bog grasses.

William Blake’s lines from ‘Augeries of Innocence’ were in my thoughts while trying to capture this connection between heaven and earth:

‘To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour’

Have you ever experienced this oneness?