'Fossil Portrait', oil on linen, 90 x 45cm, 2005

'Fossil Portrait'

A much younger fossil!

This won the 'Portrait Ireland' competition in 2005 and hung afterwards in Newtownbarry House in Wexford, Ireland. I'm not sure of its current location.

I hold the fossil ammonite as a symbol of geological time, of mortality and extinction, applying both to myself, my species and my art (which in the opinion of some is 'dead,' 'no longer relevant,' 'no longer contemporary').

I wanted to see if I could embrace these ideas and turn them back on themselves as a critique of the 'contemporary', the fashionable, the ephemeral. It is also a natural form that grows and spirals out from a central point, an origin, which is what my art seeks to imitate and emulate in substance and in spirit.

- Conor Walton, May 2021