Rooftop archive 11 late 1990s

For previous posts from the so-called "rooftop archive" look at the most recent here, which gives links to all the others.

In the late 1990s there was a major fire at a printing company near to where one of my sisters lived. She told me that there was a big skip outside the establishment and reams of paper were being thrown into it. My husband (also an artist) and I drove over to check things out and came away with an abundance of grey heavy stock card, 88 cm x 50 cm, and large sheets of all-purpose cardboard. Because of this supply windfall, I felt very free to sketch on a large scale. In 1998 I had an exhibition planned for the following year, but was still unsure of what a new body of work would look like. I was fondly remembering my time living in rural Kerry, which had come to an end in the fall of 1996. One of the most amazing memories of this rural time was my sighting of Comet Hyakutake from the field in front of my house, Knockeen. On a clear night the stars in Kerry were magnificent. 

I must apolise for the sheen on these drawing/paintings, I was using gloss medium to thin the acrylic. I gessoed the grey card first and worked in thin layers of colour to build up a certain (unphotographable!) luminosity. In front of the house, there was a gate leading to a large field beyond and it was from this field that I viewed the comet above the outbuilding ruins beside my house.

I thought the gate itself was an important image and began combining it with other familiar imagery from my work. The figure here was the outline of a life size cut out I had made of my body using the all-purpose cardboard.

Again, this is an example of how I was combining past imagery with the image of the gate (which for me echoed the trellis that had appeared in earlier paintings and drawings).

 

Once I had started using flowers in my work, however, there was no stopping me. Grounding the heavy card with gesso, I decided to do some drawing with oilstick and graphite -- a combination that I still enjoy. I realised how much I like drawing and painting flowers and decided that this would be the subject of my next exhibition. I suspect that due to the size of this piece I could not afford the framing so it did not make it into Blessings, which showed first at Signal Arts Centre, Bray, in 1999 and then Cavan County Museum, Ballyjamesduff, in 2000.

The exhibition Blessings consisted of large acrylic paintings on canvas, medium sized oilstick & graphite drawings on paper and very small monoprints of both wild and cultivated flowers. This is an oilstick & graphite drawing from that exhibition. “Honeysuckle”, 43 cm x 37 cm, 1999, is framed and hanging on the wall in my bedroom.

Rooftop archive 10 - mid 1990s

I showed some of the drawings from 1992 that began my obsession with windows and the stonework ruins in the rooftop archive post, here. In that post I also give links to previous rooftop archive posts. When I moved to Ireland in 1993 I brought with me a series of large paintings that I had completed in Toronto the previous year and had full intention of creating more in this series. This series became the exhibition My Tower of Strength and toured arts centres throughout the island of Ireland 1994-1998.   

Early in 1994 I relocated to rural Kerry where I was reunited with my favourite castle ruin, ie, Ballycarbery Castle near Cahersiveen.

I was offered an exhibition at St John's Art Centre in Listowel first and thought it was the perfect place to display My Tower of Strength (a former church, open stonework walls) but I wanted more paintings in the exhibition and got to work on these window drawings, which were studies for the Ballycarbery paintings. 

There were five Ballycarbery paintings altogether, but I'm not sure which of these six drawings did not make it into my final decision plans for what I would paint! It may have been this one, but I'm not sure...

The Ballycarbery paintings, which were the brightest (predominantly yellows, greens and pinks) works in the series and all completed in early 1994 before the touring exhibition began. Although St John's  was the first to offer me a show, the touring began in Siamsa Tire, Tralee, who also wanted the exhibition at a slightly earlier date.

Ballycarbery Castle had a great many intact windows to choose from and I enjoyed drawing them. 

All of these sketches are acrylic on paper and 76 cm x 56 cm.

When I moved to rural Kerry, I thought the phenomenon of drying peat hanging out of ruined outbuilding windows was most interesting. Surprisingly, I never took this concept further than sketches and photographs, especially as I moved to a house near Portmagee in 1995 and my husband stacked peat in ruined windows of our own abandoned outbuildings! As with previous window ruin drawings, this is acrylic on paper, 76 cm x 56 cm.

Darby's Bridge

 The final painting that I wanted to do for the Memory Is My Homeland series had to do with the first house that I rented (with my then boyfriend, now husband) in Kerry after returning to Ireland in the early 1990s. As I have been creating this body of work for the better part of three years, simply search within this blog to see other paintings, prints and drawings that are part of this series, most of which will be shown next spring at Rathfarnham Castle in an exhibition of that name. Before I had decided on the final title of the series, I was referring to it as The Home Project.

We had ended our European travels in the spring of 1992 in Ireland, and had gone down to Kells Bay in Kerry to visit a Dublin friend who had moved there. On returning to Ireland this friend (easily) convinced us to move to this beautiful village and even found us a place to live, beside this bridge whose name gave itself to the house we lived in, as a postal address.

 As with most of my work, I have a very clear idea of what my image will be before I put any media down. The green and blue blurs of paint denote to me the background of sky and hill; I have sketched out the bridge itself with a yellow line. 

Even at an early stage in the painting, I am giving a clear indication of the end product, though there is also always the uncertainty of how paint is going to play out on the pressed cloth. I enjoy this level of unpredictability in my painting, most especially a factor when using a ground that is not canvas.

The stone bridge harks back to my series of paintings from the '80s and '90s, My Tower of Strength, which built on my obession with stone ruins of windows. Interested in the architectural structure of a window (usually from monastic sites) I proceed to paint bricks with magical colour - purples, blues, pinks and yellows. I think with the bridge I have been a bit more conservative, but then again...

While I wanted the trees on the background hill to remain elusive, I wanted them also to be a more definitive blur. I have seen some pretty magnificent rainbows in this land and there is something about them that will forever be magical to me, despite their role as a cliché.

Darby's Bridge, acrylic on pressed cloth, 70 cm x 54.5 cm, 2021

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.

Memory Is My Homeland prints - part 2 of 2

This is the second blog to feature linoprints that I made towards the end of last year. I blogged part 1 last week, which can be seen here. The unique prints on silk fibre sheets (that I made last fall during my studio residency at Signal Arts Centre) will be included in my exhibition next spring, Memory Is My Homeland, at Rathfarnham Castle.

This image of a clothes peg developed from my thoughts of living with my Mum and Dad in Bray in the late 80s and early 90s. Living with them as an adult was so completely different than growing up with them as my "parents". We each seemed to understand that there was now a person to person relationship and sharing household chores was part of this new, gratifying dynamic.

Clothes Peg, linoprint on Fabriano Tiepolo paper, edition of 10, image size: 6cm x 7.5cm, 2020

I added some mauve threads as inclusion to the silk fibre sheet when I was making it. 

silk fibre sheet size: approx 21cm x 27cm

In 2017 I wrote a fictionalised account of a specific incident that happened when I and one of my sisters were caring for my Mum the previous year, shortly before her death. Prayers for My Children was published by the online journal, Tales from the Forest, and can be read here. For me the image of rosary beads was a strong one and I cut a lino block with both the incident and the story in mind.

Prayers for My Children, linoprint on Fabriano Tiepolo paper, edition of 10, image size: 6cm x 7.5cm, 2020

I did not use any dyes for the silk sheet I printed the image onto, but I there are small torn paper (acid-free) inclusions.

I loved the gate between our second house in Kerry, near Portmagee, and the field in front of the house. The gate itself was white picket with a blue glass ball on the pillar-post on one side. My husband had dug up two wild rose plants from the roadside hedge across from our first Kerry abode in Kell's Bay and planted them on either side of the gate. When we left there and moved back to Bray a year and a half later, the roses were dug up again, waited for several years in pots and finally transplanted in the garden of our more permanent house now.

Field Gate, Knockeen, linoprint on Fabriano Tiepolo paper, edition of 10, image size: 6cm x 7.5cm, 2020

I added some blue pigment to the silk sheet when I was making it.

silk fibre sheet size: approx 22 cm x 27 cm

One of my earliest memories as a toddler (maybe two years old?) is using the chain fence - that divided the surrounding sidewalk from the lawn in front of the first house where I lived in Toronto - as a swing. For the longest time I thought this must be a false memory as it didn't make any sense to me. When I was in my 20s, however, I passed by the house while on a streetcar in downtown Toronto and saw the exact type of chain fence that I remembered. It was a low barrier, maybe a foot high, made of sturdy chains that curved to small posts at regular distances in front of the gardens of a row of houses. Only a very small child could possibly use this as a swing and obviously I must have!

I put both green threads and torn bits of paper as inclusions when making this raw silk fibre sheet.

image size: 6cm x 7.5cm

silk fibre sheet size: approx 21 cm x 26 cm

painting update!

The work on my big painting, Knockeen, is going on at a steady but slow pace. I posted about the beginnings of this painting here, and some thoughts about how it was developing in March, here. As I mentioned before, it is slow and steady work. By the end of March I had all colours blocked in and started re-working particular areas.

The night sky got some further work to make the stars and the comet (Hyakutake as a matter of fact!) more apparent. I am planning further painting in this area, but I wanted to get some of the main elements in before I moved on to another area.

I worked on getting some colour into the whole sky. Although I like the specific blue of the daylight sky, I see it eventually taking on a lighter shade.

While I abhor browns, I want the outbuildings to have a darker, more defined presence. A mix of purples and reds has a rich bronzey effect that I am happy with. I paint thinly in glazes so the under drawing and previous washes of colour are always visible. I love showing the painting's history and development.

The green fields and island in the background started to develop with deeper colours.

I also want some of foliage in the foreground to be more intense. You can see here how I painted a brighter green on the montbretia leaves.

painting

I am working slowly but steadily on the large painting, Knockeen, which is based on my memories of the place and events of my time at the second house I lived in, in Kerry, from the spring of 1995 to the fall of '96 (when I returned to Bray). To bring you up to speed, I previously blogged about starting this painting here and its very early stages here. In the last week of February it looked like this.

I started adding some darker blue into the night section of the sky, several of the calla lilies (from a dream), the blue glass ball on the gate, and I used blue to start the delineation of the animals (cows and people). Several years ago, I posted pictures of a couple of works on paper that are relevant to this painting, their subject matters being the Kerry night sky and Comet Hyakutake in one, and the field gate and ruin in the other. You can check out those images and that post here.

Here is a close-up of the blocked-in callalilies. I had never seen so many callalilies till I moved to Kerry. Huge bunches of the white flowers graced country lawns, but when I dreamt of them they were pink and blue.

I knew I wanted a deeper green around the flowers than I had first blocked in, so I mixed a different colour. This also added a more definite shape to the flowers.

Here is a more detailed picture of the figures and cows being delineated by blue.

I added in some more purple (dioxazine violet) as my preferred stand-in for black, delineating the ruins, the two outbuildings, and some of the clothing on the figures.

No, I did not use brown for hair or an outbuilding - this is a mix of dioxazine violet, cadmium red medium and a smidgen of cadmium yellow light! Another shade of green can be seen in the bush here too. I also used some titanium white on the cows and t-shirt of the woman, plus some pale pink for the snouts of the beasts. Coming along nicely!

Knockeen - preparations for new large painting

I am getting ready to embark on another large painting for the Memory Is My Homeland series. After moving to Ireland in the winter of 1993, we moved to Kerry early in the new year of 1994. We rented a house at Darby's Bridge and got married the following year. I think our landlord was very worried that we were getting too ensconced in our little village (the whole village celebrated our wedding, both before and on the day!) and pulled the rug out from under our rental. As we were not ready to leave Kerry just yet, we had a fair bit of help (both human and supernatural!) in finding another place to live. Knockeen, just outside Portmagee, was our rural home for the next year and a half. It is representative of the huge part of my life as an emigrant, getting settled, living rurally, being married, and continuing with my creative life. My Dad also died in 1995, which precipitated my return to civilisation the following year. But in the meantime, there was so much that I remember about this place: the brisk swims in Portmagee Channel (behind our house), the most amazing blackberries from our own boreen, the fuchsia hedges on the roadside, the brilliant red-orange montbretia and wild roses winding and beneath those hedges, the ubiquitous and mischievious cows, the smell and look of grassy wedges of unprocessed turf, the phenomenal night sky with no light pollution - perfect views of the river of the Milky Way and Comet Hyakutake, and so much more. Of course, even for a large painting I have to pick and choose what concepts will be represented.  I sketched the composition I had in my head. I inluded blackberries, calla lillies (I saw these for the first time in rural Kerry gardens and used them in an installation tribute to my Dad; I blog about that here), fuschia, wild roses, the buildings of the house, sheds, and ruins, the gate that led to the field at the front of the house, the night sky, and of course several cows.

I envisage this as mostly a daylight painting, but insist that Comet Hyakutake and the night sky must make an appearance. When I was in Venice last October, I visited the Peggy Guggenheim collection and this Magritte painting, Empire of Light, has night and day together, so my painting won't be the first to introduce such an anomaly. Whereas Magritte's painting is disturbing and somewhat menacing, I am adding the night sky in recognition of it's magnificence - the feeling of natural awe.

As everything is blooming at the moment, it was easy enough for me to simply go outside and sketch some of the foliage from the wild rose in the front yard. It is the same plant that was across the road from our house in Darby's Bridge, which we brought with us when we moved to Knockeen and planted beside the gate, then uprooted it again to bring with us when we moved back to Bray in 1996.

There is a wild fuschia hedge in the front yard too. The wild cuttings overtook the garden varieties when we planted them outside the current house when we moved here nearly 18 years ago. Each year the hedge grows to a massive size, which the bees love, and gets cut back in the winter.

I did a colour composition sketch that has all the elements and general placements that will appear in the final painting. I was looking at some previous work I have done related to Knockeen here and here. In the earlier image of the comet, it appeared in the sky at a different angle so I will probably be changing that in the final painting. A few more research drawings and I'll be ready to start!