About the artist
based in
Blackrock, Co. Dublin
practice
Scenographer, Educator & Visual Artist
education
NCAD & University of Limerick
currently
Rug Art — Industrial Graffiti series
Patrick Molloy: Scenographer, Visual Artist and Educator living in Blackrock, County Dublin. He is a graduate of the National College of Art & Design and of the University of Limerick. Patrick works across the mediums of painting, printmaking, rug-art and 3D visual interpretations of the written word for performance.
Education
NCAD, Dip Des, 1971
University of Limerick, MA Digital Media Development in Education, First Class Honours, 2026
Artistic Journey & Inspiration
From childhood I liked drawing, colouring in the outline illustrations in my storybooks and my brothers’. I was also influenced by my father’s modelmaking of wind-up and glider aeroplanes and of scale boats. My early interest in drawing, painting and model making accompanied me through school, where my art teacher Mr. John Coyle encouraged my developing abilities.
This coincided with serving at weekends in my father’s Fish, Poultry and Delicatessen, which attracted the custom of some Dutch designers living in the hinterland of Blackrock. I approached Cor Klassen and Jan de Fouw, and showed them some of my work. They assured me that I showed some ability, and set me tasks to design labels and packaging for known products in the shop. The results gave them confidence to assure me and my father that I should go to art school. In 1966 I got a place in the National College of Art & Design. Before I graduated in 1971, I had changed direction towards set design for stage and screen, and post-grad secured a contract in RTÉ’s Production Design Department.
Following an earlier career in scenographic design for stage, screen and promotional design, and latterly a career in design education at IADT Dún Laoghaire, I have re-engaged with visual arts.
This came about over a decade ago from a moment of wonder while walking to Stillorgan Shopping Centre. I noticed colourful sprayed and brush-painted letters, numbers, arrows and what appeared to be random lines on both the pavement and the road. This colourful calligraphy against the textures of tarmac, or overlapping the concrete kerb, metal shore covers and double yellow lines, occupied my mind. I wondered about the divisions of surfaces, and how proportionally they would divide and look within a square. On the way home, I took numerous photos of the markings on my phone, and with some economy 40cm x 40cm canvases from Lidl, I began to experiment. The result is my Industrial Graffiti series of studies.
Exhibitions (2020–2026)
2026 Artists Network Dún Laoghaire Rathdown (ArtNetdlr), Members Open, February–April
2026 Signal Arts, Members Open, March–April
2025 Birr Vintage & Arts Festival Open Call, August
2025 Signal Arts, Members Open, March–April
2024 ArtNetdlr Biennale Collaborative, Lexicon Gallery, Dún Laoghaire, November
2023 Artist Residency, The Millrace Gallery, Blackrock, August
2023 ArtNetdlr, Connect, Members Open, May–July
2022 Artist Residency, The Millrace Gallery, Blackrock, August
2022 ArtNetdlr, E-mergence, Members Open, April
2022 Presentation Arts Centre, Enniscorthy, March–May
2022 Signal Arts, Members Open, March–April
2022 ArtNetdlr Members Biennale Collaborative “Metamorphosis,” March
2020 Signal Arts Bray, Members Open, Online, March
2020 Signal Arts, Bray, Open, August
Show earlier exhibitions (2014–2019)
2019 Artist Network Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown, “Hinterland,” May
2019 Signal Arts Bray, Members Open, Online, April
2019 Presentation Arts Centre, Enniscorthy, March
2018 Presentation Arts Centre, Enniscorthy, June
2017 Connections Art Fair Galway, August
2016 Art Source, RDS, November
2015 ArtNetdlr, “Collaborations,” May
2015 Art Source, RDS, November
2014 Art Source, RDS, November
2014 Solo exhibition, Gallery Sol, Dawson Street, October
Collections
In private collections in Ireland and abroad
Wexford County Council
Blackrock Clinic
"Why I Make What I Make"
To some extent, I am reacting to the prolific, contemporary, populist, loose style of “impressionist abstraction” or is it “Abstract impressionism”?
With hand on heart, I cannot decide if or to what extent my thinking, approach and texturing has been influenced by the Modernism, Abstract, Expressionism and Pop art of artists such as Piet Mondrian, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Jackson Pollock and more recently Gerhard Richter and Charles Tyrrell, their work give me pause for thought.
I want my work to celebrate the everyday, the banal, the utility. I am taken by informatics, utility services, mark-making, industrial graffiti/calligraphy.
For this work I favour a square format and the opportunity it affords for the division of a surface space, on a basic shape through reference to a combination of aesthetically questionable source materials, with strong formal and abstract qualities. The square format canvas confronts up and down, left and right. It simulates a slab, a solid horizontal section of surface, at times not necessarily indistinguishable from the observed reality.
Technique:
My approach to texturing stems from my prior experience of painting backcloths and scenic elements for theatre productions. In my “Industrial Graffiti” series, I mask out shapes and build up a texture over the masking with scrunched up tracing paper used in the “potato printing” mode. For some embellishment, I may flick pigment from a Hogs Hair bush by pulling a finger backwards over the bristles. Occasionally, I like thin erratic dribbles from the end of a stick. For this technique, I lay the canvas on a horizontal surface, sometimes the floor. With oils it is important to wait till each glaze (layer) has dried thoroughly before working on the next.