Captivating Brightness

by Total WP Support Inc.. Posted on September 21, 2012

21 Sep

So we stopped and parked in the spring-cleaning light

Of Connemara on a Sunday morning

As a captivating brightness held and opened

And the utter mountain mirrored in the lake

Entered us like a wedge knocked sweetly home

Into core timber.

taken from Ballinahinch Lake a poem from the collection entitled Electric Light by Seamus Heaney

The 35th Clifden Arts week festival is upon us and there is a rich and varied programme that encompasses the visual arts, poetry, music, dance and performance. It is one of the very best times to be in Clifden and because it is a community arts week no section of our population is excluded as the artists visit and perform in our schools and throughout the community. The ten day festival concludes on Saturday night next with a lantern-lit costume parade and aerial dance performance. This is always a spectacle and involves local national and secondary school children under the guidance of the multi disciplinary ‘Fidget Feet’. This year we are honoured to welcome President Michael D. Higgins who officially opened the celebrations last night.

‘Captivating Brightness’ is the title of an exhibition that was specially curated by IMMA ( The Irish Museum of Modern Art ) to celebrate the festival and to pay homage to Irish artists in the last century who have drawn on the West of Ireland for their inspiration. The title for the show was taken by kind permission from Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘Ballinahinch Lake’ (above). This impressive exhibition includes paintings by Jack Yeats, Paul Henry and Mainie Jellett alongside contemporary works by artists such as Dorothy Cross, Barrie Cooke and Sean McSweeney. I went along to the show which was launched by Mary Banotti. Speakers also present were Christina Kennedy – Senior curator and Head of Collections IMMA, Desmond Lally – Arts Committee, Clifden Community Arts festival, our very own Brendan Flynn who is founder and leading light of Arts week and Eamonn McLoughlin.

Mary Banotti spoke about the ghosts in the room – a century of artists brought together and bound together directly or indirectly by the landscape of the West. Paul Henry’s ‘Lake and Blue Mountain’s of Connemara’ (above) depicts the landscape sensitively and just as it is. Other artists such as Louis le Brocquy and and Mainie Jellet spent time here while others such as Gerard Dillon made Connemara their home.

Christina Kennedy talked about this exhibition as part of IMMA’s wish to bring art back to the people. There is an enormous sense of this and I had to remind myself that I was standing in the old Supervalu in Market Street ( now a transformed space ) and not in a gallery in our capital city. It’s proper place you might say, where it all began and now returns. Yet it is still a remarkable thing and a credit to the Arts week committee and the high esteem with which this Clifden festival is held Nationally and Internationally. Enjoy it while it’s here.

Megaceros Hibernicus by Barrie Cooke

Saddle by Dorothy Cross

First Egg

by Total WP Support Inc.. Posted on September 19, 2012

19 Sep

We have three new hens in the family – two Rhode Island Reds and a Bluebell chosen by each of our three girls. Sadly, we lost our last two hens to the fox but we’ve added some extra security measures so that hopefully this won’t happen again.

The new arrivals are only a few months old and not yet laying or at least that was the case until a few days ago. I was taking some pictures in the garden when I heard the familiar sound of a nesting hen ( lots of noise, poor girl ) so I had my camera in my hand when I went to take a look. Sure enough, the bluebell was in the nesting box. One of the other hens was keeping her company and feeling a little camera shy..

Our girl got up just a few seconds later and turned around to see for herself just what had happened!

Job done, she followed her pal out of the coop..

and down the ramp for a well deserved drink of water. Well done Missie!

Night Bog

by Total WP Support Inc.. Posted on September 17, 2012

17 Sep

I found this painting (below) in a drawer of old works. It’s very small, about 4″ x 3″ and I’d started it about two years ago for a group exhibition. I was unhappy with it at the time and decided to put it away. Sometimes these discarded paintings don’t seem so bad later on so when I came across this one recently, I thought I might rework it a little. The white patch in the middle ground is a damaged area where something stuck to it and then the paint was removed. While I like the colours in the piece, I think it lacks definition.

This is the finished piece below. I’ve given the sky more interest and direction using some white paint and a little charcoal. I’ve also added a fine wash of gold and blue. I tidied up the white patch with some brown ink and then I put some gold grasses in the foreground. I’ve pushed the grasses diagonally across the bottom of the image to give a sense of atmosphere. Finally I added some tiny gold highlights in the middle ground where the light of the moon might be catching the tips of the lighter bog grasses.

Blackberries

by Total WP Support Inc.. Posted on September 14, 2012

14 Sep

Blackberry picking is as much a part of Irish childhood as the 99 ice cream cone, watching Saturday morning cartoons and rice krispie buns. I think smeara dubha was one of the first Irish words we learnt at school and there was usually a story in the first term or an essay to be written on ‘Ag Piocadh Smeara Dubha’.

These photos were taken on a road near our home where my own girls go to collect the berries with the same excitement and pleasure that I experienced at their age. They trawl the roads and hedgerows and return with sticky purple-tinted hands, brambly clothes and plastic buckets filled to the brim. G likes to make berry smoothies with vanilla ice cream ( sieved to get the bits out ) and my favourite ( when the mood takes me ) is apple and berry sweet pastry tart served with piping hot custard. Yum.

Here’s some more pictures – this one below is a more typical bunch with it’s assortment of blacks, reds and greens and some empty stalks where the ripe ones have been nabbed.

This next cluster is almost ready to bloom, each berry a strange parcel of swelling crimson lobes..

I like this next photo because it includes the berries that have just started to turn. Close up, the creeping mould looks more like sprinkled sugar than decay. Theres something lovely about it as an image of the cycle of nature, from earth to fruit and back to earth again in just a few weeks. A reminder to enjoy them while we can.

Bog Furrow

by Total WP Support Inc.. Posted on September 12, 2012

12 Sep

I’ve been working on this one for about a week. It hasn’t come together as easily as the last couple of paintings, I’m not sure why. Perhaps my enthusiasm has waned a little since the first and I need to change direction for a while. Here’s how it started below.

This is the next stage. This large furrow is the main interest and I’ve added a grey pool to draw the eye down and in to the painting. I’ve tried to vary the colour and texture of the grasses but I think this middle ground looks confused. I also think that the brown line following the direction of the hill downwards has the effect of slicing the picture in two..

Here’s the painting as I have left it below. I’ve developed the background a bit by adding some colour and definition to the sky and the mountains. I’ve tried to make the grasses interesting by varying the blocks of colour on either side of the furrow. I’ve also softened the brown line so that it doesn’t break up the composition as much. The direction of the grasses pushes against the direction of the hill, hopefully to give a stronger sense of movement. I’m still a bit unsure about this one – I can see the struggle in it and I wonder if this is obvious to the viewer. Let me know what you think.

Bogland – Seamus Heaney

by Total WP Support Inc.. Posted on September 10, 2012

10 Sep

I came across this photograph with Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘Bogland’ on the Connemara Heritage and History site. It is such a beautiful image and it mirrors the words of this poem perfectly.

Seamus Heaney is of course our very own Nobel laureate and arguably one of the most celebrated and popular poets in the world today. This poem was written in 1969 and is regarded as a milestone in Heaney’s career because it was here he first realised ‘an image for the unconscious part of Ireland through a natural part of the landscape where history reposed and was revealed’ * I love this idea of the bog as a metaphor for our psyche, our subconscious and our innermost secrets. It also brings to mind a tree with it’s outer crust and hidden rings underneath, circling time and out of sight until the surface is broken.

Heaney alludes to the ancient bog bodies in much of his early poetry, particularly the viking bodies found in Denmark in the 1950’s. One of these is Tollund man, a male body which has been carbon dated to 230 BC. This man received a violent death like many of the other bog bodies and Heaney has used this in his poems as a political analogy to the unravelling violence in Northern Ireland. Grauballe man was found two years after Tollund man, also in Denmark. Heaney wrote a poem in his honour which begins;

As if he had been poured

in tar, he lies

on a pillow of turf

and seems to weep

the black river of himself.

taken from The Grauballe Man

Such beautiful, tragic and human imagery. It is thick with blackness, a darkness and a beauty that feels uniquely Irish.

The poem ‘Bogland’ has a different perspective. It starts with a comparison to the vast prairies of America. Later, there is an image of ourselves ‘striking inwards and downwards’ – self searching rather than the explorative, outward search of the early American pioneers. He concludes that ‘the wet centre is bottomless’. Here too an image of blackness, like space, a romantic void of disappearing sludge that is rooted in earth and has the preservative qualities of the womb but which falls away to some vast infinite place.

Bogland

We have no prairies

To slice a big sun at evening –

Everywhere the eye concedes to

Encroaching horizon,

Is wooed into the cyclops’ eye

Of a tarn. Our unfenced country

Is bog that keeps crusting

Between the sights of the sun.

They’ve taken the skeleton

Of the Great Irish Elk

Out of the peat, set it up

An astounding crate of air.

Better sunk under

More than a hundred years

Was recovered salty and white.

The ground itself is kind, black butter

Melting and opening underfoot,

Missing its last definition

By millions of years,

They’ll never dig coal here,

Only the waterlogged trunks

Of great firs, soft as pulp.

Our pioneers keep striking

Inwards and downwards,

Every layer they strip

Seems camped on before.

The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage.

The wet centre is bottomless.

Seamus Heaney

* taken from Landscape or Mindscape? Seamus Heaney’s Bogs by Diane Meredith, The University of California, Davis.

Cover image taken from Connemara Heritage and History

Finishing

by Total WP Support Inc.. Posted on September 7, 2012

07 Sep

I often find returning to a painting more difficult than starting out. When I begin something, I usually have a fairly clear idea about what I want to do and there is a sense of urgency in getting that down. When I return to a painting, it is different because now there is something there and while there is a desire to keep going, there is also a certain anxiety not to mess it up. The danger is to tread too cautiously and drain the life out of the piece with tentative brush strokes and lack of experiment. Since these two pieces were near completion when I left them last, this fate was less likely although perhaps that is ultimately for you the viewer to decide..

This is the first painting as I left it below. You can compare it with the finished version underneath. I’ve added more detail to the grasses in the middle ground using a combination of green and red inks and a bristle brush. I’ve also tidied up the mountains in the background and darkened the left foreground with more green ink. Finally, I mirrored the white grasses on the right of the brown furrow with a broad stroke of white and gold paint.

Here’s the second painting I worked on with it’s finished version beneath.

I’ve changed this one quite a bit so hopefully it hasn’t lost too much of the clarity that it had.

I decided to darken the mountain in the background to make it recede more and I’ve added lots of colour and texture to the grasses in the foreground. I wanted to bring some green back in to the piece and I also wanted to define the cut bog so I straightened some of the dark brown lines. Finally, I added a wash of ink to the sky to give it a little more depth. I’m calling it finished. What do you think?

Apple-Ripe September

by Total WP Support Inc.. Posted on September 5, 2012

05 Sep

Ripe apples, back to school, my birthday, blackberries, evening classes, woolen scarves, crispy air and pink skies. These are just some of the things I like about September.

We’ve been collecting apples from our trees for the last few days. We have just two – a crab and an apple blossom. The crab is still young so not enough fruits yet for jelly, but their colour brightens up the garden (below), a last hurrah before the Autumn settles in.

G likes to stew the apple right down to a pulp, then he adds molasses and pours it over yogurt. I like it barely cooked with porridge, a set-me-up for the day, delicious and all the sweeter because it’s our own. It was warm and bright this morning so I took some photos to capture them before they disappear into the kitchen.

All this talk of September and apples brought the much loved Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh to mind. His poem ‘On An Apple-Ripe September Morning’ with its imagery of early Autumn and the threshing recalls another time. Men folk gathered together to get the crops in, neighbours and friends lending a hand or paying their dues and all the loose chatter and gossip in between. Nature soaks through the lines – mist-chill fields, wet leaves of the cocksfoot and glistening bog-holes. The last verse ends on a note of awe and admiration towards all this beauty ‘I knew as I had entered that I had come through fields that were part of no earthly estate.’

On An Apple-Ripe September Morning

On an apple-ripe September morning

Through the mist-chill fields I went

With a pitch-fork on my shoulder

Less for use than for devilment.

The threshing mill was set-up, I knew,

In Cassidy’s haggard last night,

And we owed them a day at the threshing

Since last year. O it was delight

To be paying bills of laughter

And chaffy gossip in kind

With work thrown in to ballast

The fantasy-soaring mind.

As I crossed the wooden bridge I wondered

As I looked into the drain

If ever a summer morning should find me

Shovelling up eels again.

And I thought of the wasp’s nest in the bank

And how I got chased one day

Leaving the drag and the scraw-knife behind,

How I covered my face with hay.

The wet leaves of the cocksfoot

Polished my boots as I

Went round by the glistening bog-holes

Lost in unthinking joy.

I’ll be carrying bags to-day, I mused,

The best job at the mill

With plenty of time to talk of our loves

As we wait for the bags to fill.

Maybe Mary might call round…

And then I came to the haggard gate,

And I knew as I entered that I had come

Through fields that were part of no earthly estate.

Patrick Kavanagh

(1904 – 1967)

Belonging

by Total WP Support Inc.. Posted on September 3, 2012

03 Sep

I came to the West of Ireland when I was in my twenties so I am not from this place.

I’ve been thinking about this recently, how Connemara has become my adopted home and how privileged I am to be able to live and work here. I’ve also been thinking about my grandfather who was a farmer in Leixlip, County Kildare where I grew up. He made his living from the land but in a different kind of Ireland, one of struggle and deprivation the like of which I have never known. His working days would have been long and hard, tending his few cattle and working the soil as best as he could. I’m sure that he often felt anxious about meeting the needs of his large family and it was a terrible shock for them all when he passed suddenly at just 46 years of age. I hope that while he was alive and in spite of the hardship, he was able to draw strength from the land and from his honest work in the clear fresh air with nature as his companion. The perspectives are so different – different generations, different eras on opposite sides of the country. For all of this, I like to imagine that perhaps we have shared an appreciation and a gratitude for the same things.

This brings me to Robin MacArthur, a writer and musician that I’ve had the pleasure of discovering recently. Robin is from the New England area of the northeastern United States and she lives and works in a place that was inhabited by her ancestors in Marlboro, Vermont. I am intrigued by the sense of belonging that this must bring. There is something very powerful about such a long thread of attachment through time and family and Robin’s consciousness of this is immediately apparent in her creative work. I discovered an essay by Robin called ‘Abandoned Landscapes‘ in which she explores and celebrates the use of landscape in fiction and makes a plea for it’s return. I immediately connected with the sentiment – this little excerpt summarises the piece well;

‘Big sky, memory, erasure, allegory, history, decay, and metaphor; all acknowledge that we as human beings are still connected and a part of the physical world around us. Landscape, in its myriad forms, takes us literally “outide” of the self. And this escape from the self is, for me, at the heart of what I yearn for in life and in fiction.’

taken from Abandoned Landscapes by Robin MacArthur

I went on to discover that Robin is also a blogger ( woodbird, them mornings ) and a talented musician and band member with her husband Tyler Gibbons ( Red Heart the Ticker ). Her sense of belonging and reverence towards the land and it’s gifts is woven delicately but firmly through her writing and her music which I encourage you to discover for yourself.

Here is Robin’s “Love letter to Vermont,” which aired on NPR’s State of the Re:Union. It is accompanied by photographs taken by Sara Brooke Curtis and the music is by Red Heart the Ticker. It is a love letter and a thank you letter and a prayer all at once and it is written and spoken from the heart.

Cover image taken from woodbird, them mornings

Reflections

by Total WP Support Inc.. Posted on August 31, 2012

31 Aug

I went for a walk along our new cycle path just outside Clifden at the week end. It flanks the beautiful Gowlaun lake and curls around the rock faced road on the other side as it meanders in to town. It was evening and a little overcast so the light was low and a strong breeze carried cumulus cloud steadily across the sky. In between the puffy white mass, the sky was a startling blue which was reflected in the water with the last of the evening sun.

Large banks of reeds with purple crimson heads swished in the breeze – there is no sweeter sound and I hear it again when I look at this next picture below.

Here’s a close up of the reeds. I looked for it when I got home and was disappointed to find that it’s name is the Common Reed – a sadly underwhelming title for such a beautiful plant..

and some more reflections.. this bank of reeds made a lovely arc that swept across this part of the lake from where I stood. The reflection of the sky overhead is more colourful and descriptive than the sky itself from this angle.

This last photograph was taken just before I left. The evening was closing in and the landscape is almost in silhouette against the water and these gilt edged clouds. Magic.