Lough Key Forest Park

We are so lucky to live near Lough Key Forest Park. Every day on our drive to play school, we drive through this amazing folly. The road goes straight through it and we make silly wheeee! noises without fail as we drive through it. 

I stopped yesterday with a sleeping babe in the back to paint it quickly. The previous painting I did was back in late autumn, and from the other side. 

I got some artist's quality Windsor and Newton watercolours late last year for the first time ever. I had always used student quality previously, and I am really still figuring them out....I am almost tempted to say I prefer the student quality! I'm finding it hard to control the colours.

Drawing - Sliabh an Iarainn

Something I really enjoyed last year was drawing more. I love drawing and have not done an awful lot since leaving college (which is a mere 16 years ago!). It is something I come back to time and again, usually feeling very rusty!

Following the Urban Sketchers blog has been very inspiring and I find it keeps drawing in my mind, which is great. It was also there that I saw advertised a Craftsy class in travel sketching with Marc Taro Holmes, whose work I admire greatly. The class was half price (hooray!) so I signed up, not sure what I would get out of it.

It was great! Very inspiring, with simple techniques. I also loved that I could do it from my sofa - I don't have time to draw during the day but in the short time between the kids' bedtimes and my bedtime when I am usually too exhausted to do anything else, sitting on the sofa and watching a class seemed manageable, and after watching the class I felt totally inspired to draw and paint.

I thought I would share some of the drawings I made here. Above is a view from the top of our hill, drawn from a photo taken in the summer, of Sliabh an Iarainn. (More on the mountain later.) I used Mark's method of making a very quick 5-7 line drawing, sketching out the various layers of landscape, and then adding some tone using ink.

I found this scene really difficult to depict using pen and ink - there was so little variation in tone and what is one of my favourite views just looked like a vague scribble. Adding colour helped a lot. I'm not massively fond of the result, but it was a good exercise in how to tackle a difficult subject. Marc's comments were very helpful too. He is great at responding to questions - I would really recommend the class!

Sliabh an Iarainn translates as the iron mountain - iron was mined there for a long time. The Tuatha Dé Danann, (a mythical race of warriors) are supposed to have landed there in their boats. (At 585m high they must have had some pretty amazing flying boats.) They subsequently went on to have a famous battle with the Formorians not far from here at Moytura.

I love being able to see this special mountain from our hill, it is like an anchor drawing your eye in when you walk up there, and there is something about it that feels like home to me. I would love to do some drawings of how it looks at other times during the year. Maybe this year!

This week I have been...

...in West Cork. A place no one should ever go when the weather is bad in September. There were a couple of reasonable days, but then the weather got grimmer and grimmer until the fog completely obscured Cork and we were forced to attempt to visit the less weather-dependent sights, most of which we found closed when we got there.

I did manage to keep a daily diary, which was good - some excerpts of which are below.

High and low-lights included...

...the lovely tiny stone cottage we stayed in, where you could hear the sea from...

...plentiful rain...

...the Tragumna Threshing Festival, including an auction for half a pig. The pig was still alive at the Festival...

...the hilarious buttons in what I called the blame room in the Mizen Head Fog Signal Station...

...a Clonakilty Black Pudding burger for the amazing K...

...days of foggy grimness...

...nice eating from the Woodcock Smokery and local cheeses...

But most of all, my advice to anyone planning to go to Cork in September would be to avoid any bad weather, as the rest of Cork is basically Dunta (that's closed in Irish for you non-Irish speaking folk) from September on.

Better luck next time...

Memento Mori

...is the name of the show myself and my sister Jennifer Walshe have up at the moment in the

Roscommon Arts Centre. (Click on any image to see a bigger version.)

We decided to present it as a show curated by us, with work made by our alter egos, three each.

Mine are:

Nollaig Dottirson, a transgender Icelandic-Roscommon artist, who knits and felts violent artifacts - bombs, Molotov cocktails, security cameras and barbed wire.

"Nollaig's work is contextualised in her own transgendered and transnational experience (born in Reykjavik to Icelandic and Irish parents), wherein the sometimes violent renegotiation of her gender is metaphorised in her intimate, familiar and knitted appropriations of the iconography of war and aggression.

The project of feminising these icons challenges notions of masculinity and femininity, and explores violence both personal and political, from a sexually transgressive perspective."

...then comes An Snag Breac, an outsider artist living in Roscommon.

"An Snag Breac is Irish for the magpie, and represents the raiding and hoarding of unwanted objects, natural and artificial. It is the pseudonym of a Roscommon-based artist creating assemblages of phantasmagorical creatures from the discarded detritus of the natural and manufactured world.

Mixed media include textiles, wood, taxidermy using road kill animals and discarded objects. Plastic golems of flesh and bone, queer syntheses of steel, wood, skin and fleece, reflect on and recycle the workings of the inner world, both natural and psychological.

An Snag Breac’s ongoing experience of chronic pain (back and neck) underpins aspects of the biological and anatomical focus of her work, influencing her use of material – including a spine and acupuncture needles."

...and the embroidered advice handkerchiefs of textile artist Enda O'Rourke...

"Enda O’Rourke is a textile artist resident in the Boyle area. Enda’s work is a recreation and reflection of his personal history. Born in London to unmarried Irish parents, Enda was raised by his grandmother and aunts, learning to sew from an early age - the stitches and tradition dropped from grandmother to grandson. Enda’s work seeks to recreate the unspoken and lost libraries of his grandmother’s experience, in a tradition neither aural, nor written, but textile based, and in the voice his grandmother and the women who raised him bequeathed him.

Then we had Jenny's collection:

The Community Choir drawings from Turf Boon...

"Boon considers his Community Choir Drawings series an open-source composition, one in which the viewer is expected to be an active participant in decoding and assigning meaning.

The deployment of communal authorship in this project recalls for Boon the gift drawings and songs of the Shakers, drawings which were executed as depictions of heavenly inspirations or gifts. Gift drawings were not considered to be the work of an individual artist (the drawings were never signed), but a contribution to the whole community that could be employed as any member saw fit.

Boon’s Community Choir Drawings series is imbued with a similar sense of openness and generosity, which reflects his career-long engagement with the ethics of community and the importance of group spirit."

A film from Freya Birren.

Olia Lialina’s M.B.C.B.F.T.W. (Redux, At Rest)

"Russian artist Olia Lialina created her browser-based artwork My Boyfriend Came Back From The War in 1996. It is considered one of the first works of internet art, and tells the fragmented story of a woman and her boyfriend’s attempts to communicate and connect after he returns from fighting in a war.

Lialina’s work has been subject to many re-workings by different artists. Birren’s version takes Lialina’s as a starting point in both visual and textual terms. Here, however, a different story of a different soldier in a different war unfolds from Lialina’s opening line. Unlike Lialina’s pioneering use of the internet as an artisitic medium, Birren’s use of technology is deliberately low-fi - Postit notes simulate the frames of a browser, with the film processed to look like it was made in the 1970s."

Finally, the work of outsider artist CaoimhinBreathnach, shown for the first time since his death. He lived in Knockvicar and collected sound recordings, keeping a diary of his works in Ogham.

"The main focus of Breathnach’s artistic practice was the creation of his unique brand of “subliminal tapes.” This was a two-fold procedure - Breathnach began by recording sounds onto cassette tapes, before subjecting the tapes to a wide range of physical processes, such as burying, burning or encasing them in various materials such as velvet, paper or moss. In most cases, these physical processes rendered the tapes unplayable, so that the sounds recorded on them can now only be imagined.

For tape 79, Breathnach notes how he rose at dawn on the summer solstice (“grian-stad”) in 1982 to record himself playing a series of chords on the harp against the backdrop of his radio broadcasting at 1485 Khz. After sleeping with the tape under his pillow for a night, he then wore the tape strapped to his abdomen for a week, noticing significant improvement to his “strampail” and “glórghail” (both obscure words are defined in Dineen as referring to stomach noises)."

The show is on until Thursday the 25th for those of you in the area. More details here.