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

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.

life during lockdown... Part 1

My teenager keeps saying to me "nothing has really changed for you" as I have generally continued with my my work in"business as usual" mode during this entire period of lockdown. Although I have missed the more social aspects of my life especially friends and my time at the weekly ceramics workshop at Signal Arts Centre, I have found myself to be continuously busy with my art & writing, keeping in touch with people by telephone, Zoom, letter, email, Whatsapp and Skype. Perhaps I could even be accused of being more diligent at maintaining social contacts!

But shortly after lockdown started in March, I finally decided it was a good time to self-publish my first chapbook of poems. The first step to doing this was the founding of Precariat Press. After a brainstorming session, my husband, artist James Hayes designed a logo for me. And so it began! I have blogged about this previously here.

In April, I was inspired by Austin Kleon's Instagram account; he was making daily zines and I wanted to know how to make them. Kleon and a number of other bookbinders who have posted on YouTube have given really simple instructions for zines that can be made, with folding and tearing (or cutting) from a standard page. I did my own experiments with larger pages and heavier materials and blogged about it here. For a zine with more pages, simply glue two or more together!

Every year I participate in the annual incognito fundraiser for the Jack & Jill Children's Foundation. Due to Covid19 this year, the fundraiser was solely online. Normally images are made available for perusal on the incognito website, and then they are shown over a 3 day period at a Dublin gallery in April. This year there was also going to be an exhibition at a Cork gallery in May. Instead, a way to both see and buy the work online was made available. The artworks are all postcard sized and cost the same amount (€50) with the name of the artist only being revealed to the buyer after payment is made. I think the Dublin offering sold out within 15 minutes. I had two pieces in the Dublin exhibition (a detail of one being on the farthest left row, second from top).

One of my pieces (I donated three) was in the Cork show, which I believe also sold out quite quickly. My collage is second from left, second row down. I have blogged about previous incognito fundraisers here, here, here, and here.

In May I did the compositional sketch, which I will have as a reference when working on another large painting, Knockeen, as part of my current series Memory Is My Homeland. I have blogged about the origins and previous work in this series here, here, here, here, here,  and here.

I was, of course, simultaneously working on the lino design for the cover of my poetry chapbook, which would be titled Home Sweet Home Goodbye. The design is based on a childhood farewell card I made for my grandparents when they were returning to Ireland after their first visit to Canada (where I was born and grew up). I did several blogs about the design origins and progress of the linoprint here, here and here.

While in lockdown, as well as making work, I continued to browse for "virtual" opportunities. I found it quite interesting that submitting images to exhibitions taking place on the likes of Instagram made it possible to submit internationally. I submitted an image of Room Mate, a recent work from the Memory Is My Homeland series to an Instagram exhibition open call for work created during lockdown which responded to certain words. I have blogged about this oilstick drawing here and here. It will be featured in the Do It Yourway Instagram exhibition on August 14. The words that I feel the work responds to are "hard", "soft", and "reflect". Certainly my reasons for those words are apparent when I blogged about the piece here.

I have also continued to submit written work in answer to specific calls or open reading periods. Dwell Time is a mental health organisation in the UK and they put out a call for written and/or visual work in response to the lockdown. As I had specifically written several poems on this theme, I fired them off and they were published both on the Dwell Time website and its FaceBook page. I subsequently posted them on my own social media pages. Here is one of the three.

In addition to writing, making artwork, virtually socialising and reading I have been totally enjoying virtual music gigs (John Otway, Josh Ritter, Lisa Hannigan), concert film streaming premieres (Iggy Pop, New Order, Nick Cave), poetry readings (Hollie McNish), theatre (The National Theatre UK, The Druid Theatre IRL, The Abbey IRL, and Stratford Festival Canada) and opera (The Met NYC). Early on in lockdown a friend sent me a link to someone who had posted links to education, sports, business resources, health and entertainment. This was extremely helpful and alerted me to many things which are being made available, at no charge, to help keep people sane during this trying time. That is how I was alerted to free streams of first-class theatre and opera. For me the most amazing event I was lucky to see was The Met's production of Philip Glass's opera Akhnaten. It was phenomenal and indescribable and for me, something that I never would have had the chance to experience if there hadn't been this lockdown!

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!

Room-Mate

Last year, shortly after I started the Home Project, the beginnings of which you can see here and here, I stretched several small pieces of canvas on wood with the intention of doing more oilstick drawings. I got sidetracked by deciding to work on a large painting, rather than work small again, which resulted in the large painting of the main house of my formative years, Kingswood. I have since entitled this body of work Memory is My Homeland. 

After stretching the canvas on the wood, I gave it several coats of gesso. This is especially important as the media I was planning to use was oilstick.

For many years now I have painted a ground coat on a gessoed canvas in quinacridone violet. I think there is a luminescence to this colour and I don't mind if it shows through in a finished work, so I can leave edges rough if needs be.

In my current series my desire is to show more than simply the architecture of a place where I lived, but things associated with those places. Over the year that I haven't worked on the small canvases, I have kept them in mind. When I came across a Polaroid of an oil portrait I had painted of a woman who was briefly my room-mate in a shared flat in 1981, I thought to take that memory and do something with it. I have previously spoken of this place and its relation to the series here.  The Polaroid of the painting is all that exists of the portrait of a room-mate whose name eludes me, though I remember quite a few things about her with fondness.

Room-Mate, oilstick on unstretched canvas, 41 cm x 34.5 cm, 2020

Preparations for new work!

In addition to the work that I'll be doing for Precariat Press (details here and here) and the writing during the annual NaPoWriMo beginning tomorrow, I am also getting ready to embark on further work for the series Memory Is My Homeland (details of other work in this series here, here, here and here). I primed some small canvases last year, stretching them on wood, which have just been patiently waiting for my return to them.

As with most of my work where the surface has been primed, I always put a ground coat of quinacridone violet over the entire surface, before I begin the painting or drawing. I have plans for both these small formats, likely to be completed with oilstick & graphite.

Before I could prepare for another large piece (Knockeen - my second home in Kerry - is taking shape in my head) I had to take down Kingswood. It was interesting to see the reverse side of the pressed cloth painting, where the "watermark" is more apparent. This is actually the front side, had I used it for its true purpose, a roller blind, but this design would have repelled the paint too much.

I needed a bit of help to affix the large piec of pressed cloth to the wood beam on the wall.

I decided to cut the piece from the roll, weighing it down a bit with another beam of wood. Almost ready to begin!

Home Sweet Home Goodbye

It was in 1967 that my family won a St Patrick's Day competition from the "Toronto Today" news and current events tv show. As a child it was exciting for me to appear on tv with my very large Irish immigrant family, but the prize was most exciting of all: to bring relatives over from Ireland for a holiday in Toronto. This allowed me, as a seven year old child, to finally meet my grandparents for the very first time! I would meet my father's dad a few years later, but my mother's parents were both still living. I adored them and was heartbroken when they left. In the 1960s air travel was not as frequent as now, and the fact of immigration was very much that you never knew when you would see a loved one again. When my grandparents were due to leave, I made them a going away card. This card was found in my grandmother's purse, in 1980 when she died, and made its way back to me. The simple landscape is what I, as a child, thought Ireland must look like.

Of course I was very familiar with the Irish flag, which I illustrated on the inside of the card, along with my good wishes. During their visit, my grandparents nicknamed me "you know what" as I was constantly telling them things, preceding my revelations with this question phrase. I think now that I must have been driving them crazy, but they never showed any annoyance with me or discouraged my attention.

I didn't get to see them the next year, but they came for a holiday the following year, and perhaps both of them again one more time. I saw my grandmother again three more times after my grandfather's death, but through the years we wrote to each other often. I still think it is interesting that as a child I saw the creative use of a sliding puzzle (I think it came in a gum machine as a prize). I removed all the numbers and used the base as a frame for my mini-painting on the front of the card.

Kingswood - large painting

Last spring I started a new body of work based on memories of the homes in which I have lived. I discussed the beginnings of this project here and here. I wrote further about this work in relation to printmaking here and again more about it here. But in the summer I began work on the large painting, Kingswood, representing the house in Toronto where I lived for about 18 formative years. The ground is not canvas, but a type of pressed cloth used for domestic blinds, so there is a type of floral watermark design throughout.

I had a lot of research pix on different flowers (hollyhocks, lilac, apple blossoms, and the tiny white hedge flowers whose name I don't remember) as well as floral sketches, and the main composition sketch that I worked from.

I quickly found out that the ground behaved very differently from ungessoed canvas - REALLY soaking up every drop of paint. I worked loosely and thinned the paint out with water and medium (a mix of matte and gloss).

I had already decided on the 3 figures representing various stages of my life: my very young self on my Communion day (though I neglected to include the bridal veil I wore, I was more interested in the fashionable purple cape made for me by my Mum), my teenage self who spent most summers reading on the front steps of the house. and my young adult self who left home. 

This is a large painting, so it was necessary to use the step ladder to reach areas at the top and I had a cushion to kneel on when working in the bottom areas. The composition sketch was affixed to the wall the whole time I was working.

Any marks made would be visible in the finished painting. This whole painting would also be about process, and I was pleased that nothing would be hidden

There were several lilac trees in the backyard - purple and white lilacs - but my especial interest in the lilac in my painting was the heart-shaped leaves. The crabapple tree bore inedible fruit, but provided great ammunition in our "wars" with neighbourhood friends (a laneway between streets was adjacent to our house, so it was a great fort from which passersby could be pelted),

A plaid shirt and "painter" pants were my favourite clothing articles for a few years in my late teens-early 20s until art school got the better of my fashion sense and long flowy skirts were replaced by punk and neo-punk black.

As planned, I finished and signed the painting by mid-December.

Kingswood, acrylic on pressed cloth, approx 228 cm x 200 cm, 2019