Kilkenny arts week is in full swing with a range of events for theatre goers, music junkies and book lovers.
For those of you interested in the visual arts check out Shelia Naughton at Gallery one, castle yard in the Kilkenny design centre.
Some beautiful examples of brush drawings and mark making works on paper.
Also Bernadette Kiely's ethereal paintings and drawings of cricket players at Mount Juliette.

The Rha Summer Exhibition will come to a close shortly.
There are a large range of paintings on view as well as sculpture, mixed media and photography. There is also great value in the art market at the moment with prices back to more realistic values.
I always say to people, if you can buy one nice piece a year or even every two years, it doesn't take long to build up a collection of enjoyable work while having great fun donin
Be sure to have a look at the great range of work on display before it's gone.

    David Hockney again a British pop artist famously uses Apples ipad to create works of art. Using a brush app he was able to create digital works of art which he then emailed to his friends and collectors. Even though these works were created on an ipad they are instantly recognizable as David Hockneys work.
Art video installations, digital print as well as light and sound are now all part of the mainstream in art colleges and Galleries
Yet, Galleries for themselves don’t seem to employ the same embrace. I have been saying to gallery owners for some time now that it is time to come out from behind the desk and get going with a bit of self promotion. Not the usual mainstream variety of an ad in the newspaper or a glossy periodical but with new media such as audio and video.
Artists are often asked to give Gallery talks about their work and this is seen as an added bonus to meet the artist and get an understanding into the thought process behind the work.
With such unfettered access to artists a mini interview with the artist should become the norm.
As part of the whole exhibition experience from the invite to the catalogue, a video or audio piece of the artist talking about the work would help enhance the viewer experience. For the Gallery website it would help pull the site ranking up in Google search engines as well as creating an archive of the work that goes into the show. With the power of video in search engines a search by a collector for a particular artist should automatically pull up the Gallery video and hopefully a cross over to the website.
Two Irish artists that we work with, both abstract colourists have recently made their own video documentaries about their work, Declan O Mahoney from Cork and Peter Monaghan from Dublin. Perhaps in this age of recession where abstract work is seen as a hard sell they felt it necessary or maybe they just wanted to show the work and inspiration that goes into making a piece, in any case they are very interesting pieces to watch in their own right.
There are many simple tools for both computers and smart phones that make this job very simple.
For audio try Audioboo.com, this allows audio which can be tagged with relevant key words that make searching for a lot easier.
For video imovie is an extremely simple app that can be downloaded to a smart phone and allows editing, music overlay and sound recording. A share facility with face book and twitter is then at the touch of a button.