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.

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!

The Night Skies

This week I started another Future Learn course - "In the Night Sky: Orion" (the following 2 pix are from the course material). Future Learn offers free online non-credited interest courses hosted by various universities. I have already taken three courses and highly recommend them for fun, interest and educational value! This astronomy course is hosted by the Open University and runs for 4 weeks. I have always enjoyed stargazing but there is an extra dimension added through learning something!

Seeing a picture of the sky so full of stars, reminds me of the amazng night sky that is visible in rural areas that are free from light pollution. I lived rurally in South West Kerry for 3 years in the 1990s and remember well the amazing skies on cold clear nights in winter. In the first house we lived at we would take a star map and a red cellophane covered flashlight out to the humpback bridge beside our house and stare in awe: there were way more stars than the star map showed. One of my brothers visited once and we were looking at the rings of Saturn through my telescope until he pointed out that we could see the shape with the naked eye just as easily. 

Living in urban areas most of my life, this is closer to how I view the night sky. I can still pick out constellations easily enough and can boast that I have seen 4 of Jupiter's moons with the planet from the roof of a Dublin apartment!

An email from my Orion course alerted me to the fact that Comet Lovejoy is visible in the skies near Orion through January, weather permitting. I went out last night to have a look and though I spotted part of Orion, clouds quickly came in from two directions and put the kibosh on any sightings. It is raining today and the sky looks relentlessly covered, but I have hopes as I have a few weeks left to view. When I was looking up information on the comet I came across Terry Lovejoy's computer drawing of Comet Hyakutake; it reminded me that I was incorrect in an earlier posting (from 2013) when I named the comet from my painting "Knockeen Comet" as Hale-Bopp. Although I saw comet Hale-Bopp, it was not until December 1997, by which time I had already moved back to urban Bray. This painting is based on my sighting of Comet Hyakutake in the spring of 1996 when I still lived in South West Kerry, outside Portmagee. I remember that night my husband and I dragged the couch into the field outside the house and, along with a blanket to keep warm, we sat for ages staring at the wonders of the universe -- including the comet hanging in the sky, a brilliant beacon among the jewels of stars.

Perseid Meteor Shower

The annual astronomical event of the Perseid meteor shower took place last week. I had thought that having the brilliant summer we were having - clear skies and warmth - we were bound to have a good night sky so that my eleven year old daughter could finally see her first shooting star! Since I have been in Bray (I moved back here in 1996) I have not had a chance to see the Perseids as the sky always clouds over! I described to my daughter how I could see a pure starry sky when I lived in Kerry. The painting below, Knockeen Gate, is based on the view from the front of the house where I lived outside Portmagee. 

I had promised to wake my daughter if the sky cleared, and as it didn't on the Monday night she had a peaceful night sleep. When she went to bed on the Tuesday the same promise was made; amazingly there was about an hour window of opportunity between 11 and 12 pm. Though it was a struggle, I did manage to wake her. We had a little party outside, snuggling on loungers, eating crisps and looking at the stars. Though the stars are not visibly as plentiful this close to Dublin as they are in the country, there are still more stars to be seen than in Toronto. And yes, before the clouds rolled in we did see some shooting stars. Hurray, mission accomplished!

The next day, when asked about the difference between a comet and a shooting star, I was reminded that in fact I have seen two comets since coming to Ireland. The painting above, Knockeen Comet, is based on the actual view of comet Hale-Bopp that I saw from the back of my house (with an outbuilding ruin, Portmagee Channel and Valentia Island as a base for the night sky) when I lived in Kerry.