Artworks by Liam Hennessy

As a teenager I started out as a printmaker, and a lot of the processes and techniques I picked up there I have carried over into my painting and sculpture. Screenprinting in particular involves working with flat planes of colour and building up images in multiple layers, and I use this approach in much of my current work; In the end I found that painting offered me a more direct and less mediated way of working.
I am instinctively drawn to abstraction in art because of the freedom it implies, and my work is influenced in particular by the formal experimentation of 20th century abstract painting and sculpture. My work is created through a long process of layering, readjustment, and repainting until a kind of formal coherence or balance is achieved; I am very interested in the way that the eye moves around an image and I like to think of each work as a map to be explored.  I tend to work intuitively without a clear idea of where each piece will end, preferring to let the process itself direct the finished form of the work. 
I studied for a degree in fine art in my twenties followed by a master's degree in sculpture. For the last few years I have been working at Cuckoo farm studios in Essex, (an old farm converted into thirty art studios) where I work as a full time artist.