Knockeen - finished painting!

I think it was the first week of August that I declared (to myself) that Knockeen was finished and I signed it without further ado. It is a painting that I have been working on for most of this year and I blogged progress reports fairly regularly; you can see the painting's development here, here, here and here.

So here is a picture of the whole painting! Knockeen, acrylic on pressed cloth, approx 228 cm x 200 cm, 2021. I made some changes from the original composition sketch, which you can see here. The red and blue calla lilies reference a dream I had shortly before the death of my father in 1995. While I had not seen real calla lilies till I moved to Kerry, on rural lawns the flowers were always white. I talk about painting those dream flowers here.

Here is a detail from the left side.

This is another detail from the left side. I had decided very early on that I wanted to include a section of the night sky, because the sighting of Comet Hyakutake in 1996 in a completely clear Kerry night sky was amazing! I had also seen René Magritte's painting, Empire of Light, at the Peggy Guggenheim gallery in Venice a couple of years ago, and loved this possibility of painting day and night at the same time. I have previously painted Hyakutake in Knockeen and posted images here and here. (NB in the first link I mis-identify the comet as being Hale-Bopp, which saw in Bray.)

This is a detail from the right side of the painting. I have also used the image of the house and field gate at Knockeen in prints, which you can see here and here. The small gate divided the house from the field in front of it. Sometimes the cows were in it, but more often they were in the field behind or around the house, where they trampled our garden attempts, ate half the straw welcome mat and, no doubt, getting up to mischief in the cramped space behind the shed...

Although only at Knockeen for a year and a half, it was a very creative time for both my husband and myself.

Here is a detail at the bottom of the painting - fuchsia and wild roses are quintessientally Kerry to me.