Today we’d like to introduce you to Coileán Sheridan.
Hi Coileán, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
I first started out creatively just taking pictures of my friends skating because I was trash at it. I didn’t really know what I was doing but wanted to be around and found a way creatively. This is when I was probably 16 or 17 and I didn’t really even recognize at that point I was interested in a creative field. But in hindsight, I’ve always kind of been a bit of a mixed bag when it comes to my practice. Around that same time, I started to work with some friends who were producers and made electronic dance music. They had always talked about how they needed cover art so I started looking into it and a lot of the cover for that kind of music was generally 3D. So my senior year of high school and the year following I taught myself this program Cinema4D. I took a gap year and I basically ended up doing tons of free covers for friends and whoever would take my art just because I was just so excited to be making stuff.
So I was an 18 y/o pizza driver taking a gap year and I had no clue what I was doing. I didn’t know if I wanted to just get a job, go to college, if I was gonna be a bum, etc. But my mom showed me SCAD and I applied to the Savannah College of Art and Design. I didn’t do the best in high school and it was one of only two places I actually applied to. So when SCAD accepted me, I was so excited to get away from home and go to an art school rather than a regular University. I didn’t know exactly what I wanted at the time but I knew the traditional path wasn’t for me.
I came to SCAD when I was 19 for animation thinking I was going to be doing visuals, music videos, advertisements, Etc. And I started a 3D freelance career mainly doing album artwork and was really committed to being a motion graphics artist. But being in this new creative environment, I decided on a painter minor just to explore. During my courses, I was finding that I really like the craftsmanship of working with my hands and the physicality of the final product. COVID hits a little more than halfway into my freshman year right before spring break and I’m stuck at home doing online classes. I don’t know what to do, I’m bored out of my mind, so I start drawing, painting, and messing around with paint pens, alcohol markers, and anything I could get my hands on. I drew and painted every day all day because that’s all I could do. I think that time really put a battery in my back because when I came back to school on-ground about a year and a half later, I still had a painting minor but I knew that I wanted to be a painter. I switched my major and by the end of my junior year 2021/22, I was fully committed to painting.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
I wouldn’t describe my creative experience as necessarily difficult. It really helped pull me out of a bad place when I was young and continues to do so. It’s just tedious as hell, haha. But a really difficult time for me was a point when I was juggling school, painting, 3D, and freelance. I was getting 4 hours of sleep waking up at 8:00 a.m. every day working constantly either on commissions or just drawing painting making whatever I could because I felt it was really important for me to support myself creatively and express myself creatively.
I was painting, making album art, 3D music videos, and all this stuff for school. I was really doing commissions to support myself but wasn’t sure how to prioritize everything. I was burnt out, I was dirt broke, and working all the time. It came to the point where I realized that I wasn’t seeing my friends or prioritizing the right things. I knew painting was definitely my passion and that working freelance wasn’t sustainable while I was in school. I think working freelance and mainly within 3D work was a good lesson for me because it really taught me to be cautious of how I allow money to be attached to the painting. I got into 3D for fun doing covers for friends for free, but it became a means to support myself and I ended up doing commissions nonstop. I knew I wanted the painting to be separate in life. Not something I rely on for money.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I’m a painter who makes pictures out of pictures. My studio practice is really a mixed bag of painting, collage, drawing, printmaking, found objects, and digital processes. I paint loose and work in a very spontaneous and serendipitous way. I look at the canvas as a container for images, moments I build rather than a surface to be filled in with color. In the studio, I do a lot of self-reflection and in turn, some of the work is highly expressive. Despite that, I present my work void of clear intention or meaning. I feel when I associate a piece with topics like love, violence, politics, trauma, etc. the rest of my work is given the same connotation. I’m not always making everything with extreme intention or expression. Sometimes I’m just okay and I feel it’s dishonest forcing yourself to work in that way. Sometimes it’s important to make things purely so they can exist; it doesn’t make them any less legitimate. So I present my work in an ambiguous way as an attempt to give whatever I see fit life.
Collage is the foundation for my process; it provides me with a structure to build off. I love to repurpose photography and do a lot of research on photographers and catalog their work. I don’t like just pulling images straight off Google images. I think it’s important that I am intentionally selecting these images and know where they’re coming from. It really interests me how photos can inform each other when they’re in proximity. The connotations people can come up with when you have photos next to one another on the same surface. It sparks an idea that they must be related, informing each other, or exchanging some kind of dialogue. I think that idea is really important to me as I really want to give people a platform for interpretation and not tell them what to see, what it’s about. I love using found objects like discarded lottery tickets, old receipts, newspapers, temporary things, or things people would generally consider trash. I enjoy repurposing them and giving them a new life. These are small objects that would’ve been thrown away. They’re not something people would take the time to really look at, and it’s exciting to take something from a really informal place and present it as art and something to be taken seriously.
But these collages are a base for all my mixed media work. When I start painting, it’s a constant back and forth of paper and paint. I paint very expressively with a lot of motion but sometimes work very restrictively. It could be there’s a tiny piece of paper that I’ll stare at for an hour and add one brush stroke and it’s done. Other times I’m drawing cartoon characters, printing onto the surface, tearing, stamping, really layering the material, and manipulating the picture I’ve built so far. I love incorporating printmaking processes like monotypes, gel prints, cyanotypes, etc. I feel like printmaking is a sort of middle ground between photography and painting and is a fun way to layer images and disrupt the original photos I’m using.
Something I’m really proud of is Tomfoolery. An exhibition, runway show, concert, and event that was organized by my friends William Crutchfield, Audrey Conway, and Elizebeth Hancuch. I was lucky enough to show three works with my good friends Will, Liam Gildea, and Jessica Murr. My other friend and designer Thomas Jewart did all the design for the title and show cards. I also got a chance to show some 3D visuals projected and found I really enjoyed the mix of my digital and physical works in the same space. That whole experience just felt so personal and authentic.
Do you have recommendations for books, apps, blogs, etc?
I’d say for my basics I use Pinterest and Behance a lot for inspiration. The notion is to take notes and map out long-term projects. More recently something I’ve been using a lot is the Google photo scan app. It’s really helped just being able to take high-quality images anywhere. I take stuff out of magazines, posters on the street, receipts, and anything for inspiration or reference.
As far as media, I watch a ton of movies for inspiration; a couple of my favorites right now would be Whiplash and The Peanut Butter Falcon. I also watch a lot of art documentaries, but those can be hit or miss. I’d look into Francis Bacon, Philip Guston, and Marina Abramovic they all have great documentaries. A personal favorite is called Beautiful Losers, which came out in 2008. You can find it on youtube, and it’s about a group of misfit graffiti artists and their stories.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.coileansheridan.com/
