James grabs his artistic opportunity by the neck

Scarves are back in fashion big time so James McKeon of Salthill is bang on with his timing. His Kiyoni scarves are made of silk in ten different designs, or ‘stories’ as he likes to put it, and available in squares or long versions.

They are certainly works of art and every inch of them is different, so that they can produce a number of looks depending on how the wearer knots them or wraps them around their neck and shoulders.

Just fresh from the Irish Fashion Innovation Awards where he won his accessory accolade, James is modestly delighted with the recognition but is continuing to work hard with his daughter, Lisa, to market what is effectively a business in its infancy.

Kiyoni was launched over two years ago but as anyone starting a new business knows, these are still early days and patience is probably a necessary virtue until the brand gains national and international recognition.

“I obviously didn’t start out thinking my art would be printed onto silk scarves but of course I am excited that people would be wearing them as far away as Japan or anywhere,” he says.

“What is important to me is that I am now doing the type of art I always wanted to do but didn’t because Galway wasn’t ready for surrealism art in the eighties when I became a professional artist.”

James was raised in London by his Irish parents until they moved to Galway when he was 16, in the 1970s. The building boom had just started in the city and James’ father set up his own construction company. By then James had finished with formal education and went to work with his father as a draughtsman, often helping out with the labouring as well.

His natural artistic leanings proved very helpful as a draughtsman and, he says, he was the first in the country to start doing artist’s impression drawings for auctioneers.

James did the drawings for the brochure that marketed The Elms in College Road, when people bought houses off the brochure! James would be given the house plans and he would draw what the building would look like when completed. These drawings were very popular before technology and the digital age replaced these hand drawings with a CAD application where they were done on a computer.

But James didn’t mind. By the age of 30, married to Galway woman, Bernie O’Sullivan, and with two children, he had decided to concentrate on his art and turned to it fulltime.

“I had always had a vivid imagination and one of my earliest memories is of drawing. I am fascinated with the process of creation and the emotion involved in creating something.

“But what I wanted to draw wasn’t selling in those early years so I concentrated on wildlife which was in demand in the eighties,” says James who has exhibited and whose work hangs in private collections here and abroad.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.