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?

Golden Bog

by Total WP Support Inc.. Posted on August 29, 2012

29 Aug

I usually work on a couple of paintings at a time so I can explore similar themes in slightly different ways. I began this one (above) with the last painting I wrote about here ( see Land Interrupted ).

I used these photographs (below) for reference while painting – they were taken recently on the Bog Road between Clifden and Letterfrack. It was evening and there was a lovely haze of light on the bog grasses, now turning golden. The light is special here at any time of the year but it is sometimes these in between times, between Summer and Autumn, between day and evening that it is most enchanting.

This is how the painting began (below).

Next I added more colour to the middle and foreground. I altered the mountain in the background a little as I felt that this line down the middle wasn’t working.

I used lots of gold and yellow in the middle ground and some pink to suggest the heathers. Then I outlined the bog furrow using brown ink.

This is the painting as I have left it below. I worked on the bog furrow shape and the grasses around it in an effort to make them merge a little but hopefully remain distinct also. I’ve defined the mountain behind with some brown ink but perhaps a little too much, I think I will try to pull this back a little when I return to it again.

Land Interrupted

by Total WP Support Inc.. Posted on August 27, 2012

27 Aug

I got back to some painting with the photographs I took of the bog in mind (see Shifting Seasons ). I have been thinking about this notion of the cut bog as a wound. It brought to mind a passage in ‘Tinkers‘ ( a book I have already mentioned a few times! )

In this excerpt, Howard is reflecting on a woman he sees in his mind’s eye, planting flowers. He is thinking about the effect that man has on the landscape. He imagines how a consciousness of this demands some small gesture as a ‘token of redress‘

..the flowers were an act of resistance against the raw earth like an act of sheer, inevitable, necessary madness because human beings have to live somewhere and in something and here is just as outrageous as there because in either place ( in any place ) it seems like an interruption, an intrusion on something that, no matter how many times she read in her Bible, Let them have dominion, seemed marred, dispelled, vanquished once people arrived with their catastrophic voices and saws and plows and began to sing and hammer and carve and erect.

taken from Tinkers by Paul Harding, Chapter 1, page 61

I love the hyperbole in this piece and the fundamental truth of it. It made me think of the cut bog as an interruption in something that is much older than ourselves or our forefathers or anything we can possibly imagine. I don’t intend to make any kind of judgement about the use of the bog, it is just one way of seeing it, as an ancient observer might, like a star gazing down on all of time. I think perhaps it is this interruption or contrast that draws me to the bog lands. The swaying grasses and heathers are like hairs and goose bumps on skin, a living breathing thing which when damaged, reveals a beautiful shock of glistening tissue and muscle underneath.

This is how my painting of the bog began (below).

Next, I added some broad strokes of orange so that this colour will come through anything I put on top and hopefully make the surface glow.

I subsequently added more paint and ink ( using different types of brushes ) to describe the heathers and grasses – greens, reds, pinks and gold. Then I used a dark brown ink to suggest the disturbed surface where the bog has been cut and driven through (below).

It’s not finished yet but I decided to stop here before the colours became muddy. I will go back to it once this layer of paint has dried completely.

Have you read anything recently that has influenced the way that you see things?

Shifting Seasons

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

21 Aug

I went out to the Bog Road between Clifden and Letterfrack to take some photographs this week. It was a clear evening and I expected to be able to see the Twelve Bens Mountain range beyond the bog and heathers but I found something else instead – the landscape seemed to shimmer, suspended between Summer and Autumn in the evening light. The heathers still abound in gorgeous clumps of pink but the grasses are turning from green to a tawny orange colour. In a couple of weeks they will look like they are on fire in spite of the lower temperatures.

Here are some more pictures below. It was windy so the images are a little blurred but I think this captures the atmosphere.

It may sound strange but I like this next one because the cut bog reminds me of a wound. The grasses are like a layer of skin over the marrow and bones of the black bog.

$Boglands between Letterfrack and Clifden$

I stood on a mound to take this one – the neatly stacked turf dries in the evening breeze and is almost ready to take in. The changing colour of the grasses is palpable, I love it’s coppery glow.

If you click on the image, you will get a better sense of it. I am really looking forward to using these images and getting back to some painting soon.

Paul Henry

by Total WP Support Inc.. Posted on July 23, 2012

23 Jul

I’ve been looking at some of Paul Henry’s landscapes recently and thought I might write about them here.

Henry was an Irish artist who was known especially for his West of Ireland landscapes. He was born in Belfast in 1887 and he studied art in Paris before his return to Ireland where he lived and worked on Achill Island (1910-1919) off the Mayo coast for many years. While in Paris, Henry was greatly impressed by the modern avant-garde movement of the time and the bold colourful works of Cezanne, Van Gogh and Gaugain. Landscape painting was no longer just about realism but about colour and energy and the individual mark of the artist’s hand. I love this quote by S.B. Kennedy in his book on Paul Henry where he describes these new ideas of the time:

“Cezanne and Van Gogh saw clearly because they had cast aside all the theories and prejudices of the Schools and were looking at nature as if for the first time, and above all seeing it with emotion.”

This notion of seeing landscape with emotion really resonates with me because it seems to me that this is what painting is all about. I imagine then how Henry must have taken these new ideals and applied them to our own peculiar landscape and weather conditions, without the heat and intensity of the mediterranean sun. He recognised the singular beauty of the landscape and the light in the West of Ireland and he learned to articulate this using his own palette of muted colours. The painting above is called ‘Errigal County Donegal’ (c.1930 Image taken from imma.ie ) and it demonstrates this very well. The setting seems to shimmer in a kaleidoscope of greys tinged with blue and pink against the golds and browns at the base of the painting.

This next image below is an earlier work (c.1922-23) called “The Bog at Evening’. I love the simplicity of this composition – mountain, horizon line, turf and water. I admire the contrast that he has set up between the shadowy dark browns of the turf and purple mountain and the delicate pinks and pastels in the billowing cloud shapes. The reflections of the clouds in the bog water and the low evening light give the painting a perfect stillness where only the evidence of human activity now remains.

Image taken from D7ET website

This next painting is called ‘West of Ireland Cottages’. Once more, the atmosphere dominates this piece, the vastness of the sky and mountains over the small settlement of cottages. The strong blues of the mountains sing against the yellow of the thatch and gold of the bog, a perfect example of how complementary colours can be used together with great effect.

Image taken from Christies.com

This last painting (below) is called Bog Road. It uses similar colours but the tones are more subdued in the top two thirds of the canvas. The lightness of the sky contrasts strongly with the dark stacks of turf. The middle ground is highlighted with a streak of gold where the sun drops down between the clouds and sits beautifully against these ribbons of blue that he uses to describe the receding hills.

Image taken from Mayotoday.ie

Perhaps the most impressive aspect of Paul Henry’s work for me is it’s apparent simplicity. Many of his greatest paintings seem at first glance to be composed of a simple arrangement of shapes and colours. It is the degree of complexity and subtlety within these seemingly simple choices of colour, tone, shape and gesture that make them so exceptional in my opinion. As a painter, I have so much to learn from these paintings!

What do you think about them? Do you think that they are relevant to day or have anything to do with modern Ireland?

Bog Cotton Painting II

by Total WP Support Inc.. Posted on July 13, 2012

13 Jul

I’ve just finished working on this one. I’ve been tinkering with it for several days and at times painting is like this for me. Other paintings I can finish in one or two sittings. It’s hard for me to say which method works better but generally I think that there is more energy in the work that is finished quickly. This is how this painting began (below).

Here it is with more colour. These two stages were carried out during the same sitting.

I returned to the piece after a few days and added lots more detail. I’ve gone a little overboard with the blue ink here and it’s quite fluid so I have to wait until it dries before I continue.

This is the next stage (below). I’ve attempted to ‘tighten’ it up but I think that it has become confused. I’m definitely trying too hard here and it’s not working!

When I return to the painting, I try to de-clutter the image by redefining the strip of bog in the centre and I use more green in the foreground (below).

This is the painting as I have left it (below). I’ve softened some of the lines in the middle ground and I’ve used some red ink to add more contrast. I am happier with it now because I think that it has more of the atmosphere of the place. I’m reluctant to take it any further at this stage so I’ll leave it for a few days before I varnish it…what do you think?

Fields of Cotton

by Total WP Support Inc.. Posted on June 27, 2012

27 Jun

The last time I wrote about Bog Cotton it was May and there were just a few scattered strands. I stopped to take these photographs outside Oughterard last week because the cotton is in full bloom now. It may not be a field of cotton as sung by Credence Clearwater Revival (!) but this tiny Irish plant is a beautiful sight at this time of year.

These fields are carefully managed and the cotton thrives on the newly cut bog surface. My feet sink slightly into the spongy top layer as I take my picutres..

I love the contrast between the dark chestnut colours of the bog and the soft greens and pinks of the grasses. The bog cotton enhances the scene like sprinkles of tiny sugar shapes. There is something delicate about the appearance of the bog here in Summer that is almost magical.

In a few months, this will change again. The cotton will disappear and the colours of the heath will deepen and take on a fiery quality and a completely different mood.

Finished Paintings

by Total WP Support Inc.. Posted on June 25, 2012

25 Jun

I finished these two paintings over the weekend. The first one looked like this the last time I wrote about it.

I wasn’t satisfied with it the way it was so I worked at it some more and used a tiny brush to define the water channel. This recedes in to the background now which gives a stronger sense of distance but I’ve lost the rushing water in the foreground. I think it’s a different piece altogether now (below), whether or not it is a better painting is another question!

This is the other piece as I left it (below).

I felt that I needed to do very little with this one – I just altered the line of the bog on the left slightly and added some more paint to the mountains in the background. This is the finished version (below).