June 16th was Bloomsday, the annual celebration of James Joyce's novel Ulysses , the action of which takes place on one day in Dublin in 1906. I've written before about the set of etchings I made back in the late 1990s, based on the Nighttown chapter of Ulysses. But after posting images of these etchings via social media during the most recent Bloomsday, I realised I could still say something about the various things that influenced my particular interpretation of Joyce's text. When I started planning the project in 1997, I was aware of a few other artists' visual responses to the book, such as Robert Motherwell's attractive and entirely abstract etchings, some hasty and uninspired lithographs by Matisse , and (the best ones, in my opinion) semi-abstract etchings by Mimmo Paladino: Mimmo Paladino, from Ulysses I started by narrowing down to one chapter: the Nighttown chapter, which takes place in the red light district of Dublin, and parallels the Circ...
Artist Philip Hartigan talks about art, interviews other artists, and more