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

Florence Road: Butterfly Wall

As with the Kingston Road painting (here) I had a pretty clear idea of what image I wanted to represent my home when I moved back to the town of Bray from rural Kerry in 1996. Prior to giving all the walls a makeover paint job before moving in, I was horrified to find the stairwell was home to dormant but still living butterflies. My fear of butterflies comes from many years of seeming to be a target for both swarms and singular colourful insects in Toronto as they dive-bombed my curly head. My husband carefully collected the butterflies and set them free - once outside they shook off their stasis. So creating this painting was a bit cathartic for me and I am happy with the resulting overall image of rebirth. I started the painting at the end of August with composition outlines.

Finding images of 1950s style wallpaper was simple enough, I just had to choose something that suited my memory. At first I thought of using images of Monarch butterflies, but these were a type of butterfly that were more common to my childhood in Toronto. Here in Ireland it is the Small Tortoiseshell Butterfly that is very common and I expect that that was the likeliest species that I found on the stairwell wall of Florence Road.

While I set about making each buttefly unique I also wanted them to obviously be the same type.

I gave enough three dimensionality to the bannister railing to make it visually stand in front of the butterfly wall.

Florence Road: Butterfly Wall; acrylic on pressed cloth; 60 cm x 75 cm; 2021

Kingston Road: Waiting - painting finished!

I thought that the large Knockeen was going to be the last painting in this series, but then I had some ideas to do a few more, so got to work. The first of the new paintings was also going to be the largest, but considerably smaller than Knockeen and Kingswood. I decided I wanted the works to be stretched and in doing so discovered that pressed cloth is a lot more difficult to stretch than canvas! However, I do like the  unpredictability of painting on this material and think it is appropriate to the concept of memory as being sometimes blurry and unreliable, so I carried on.

I started painting, as usual, by working out the composition in yellow. I fully expect some of the yellow lines to show through in the final work and like the idea of revealing the process as I go along.

In the mid 1980s, when I lived in Toronto, I had a bachelor apartment on Kingston Rd, not far from where I grew up. Though this apt was technically in Scarborough, it was only several blocks away from Toronto, and about a 20 minute walk downhill to Lake Ontario. I was in my final years of university at the time. For an installation I was working on I painted sheer curtains, and it is those painted sheers that are hanging up in the windows (as they did) behind the figure.

The figure is, of course, a representation of the younger me, and the red checked table-cloth over my all-purpose folding card table had to make an appearance.

What I refer to as a "small" painting is relative, as is obvious by this working picture. That's Kingswood on the wall behind; I unrolled it and hung it over Knockeen, then covered the two with plastic sheeting so they wouldn't get spattered accidentally while I worked on the smaller easel paintings.

The painting in its final days. The xmas lights were a year-round thing, just as they are now in my house, though fairy lights are much smaller.

The finished painting -

Kingston Road: Waiting, acrylic on pressed cloth, 76 cm x 102 cm, 2021 

For all previous works from the Memory Is My Homeland series, please do a simple search within this blog (I have made many posts of the works in progress and completed). Also, the origins of this project may be found under the label The Home Project, as I called it when I hadn't yet decided on a name for the work.