I miss Paolo, probably more than before
Artist Susan Morley is preparing for a major exhibition of her work, in part a response to the death of her husband, food critic and chef Paolo Tullio, writes Emily Hourican
THIS time last year, artist Susan Morley was saying goodbye to her husband of nearly 40 years, the muchloved food critic, chef, writer and broadcaster Paolo Tullio. She and Paolo had separated after 30 years together but never divorced, and remained a large part of each other’s lives to the end.
This year, Susan is putting the finishing touches to a major exhibition of her work — large-scale work on paper, including drawings, watercolours and pastels of the ancient standing stones and ring forts of Kerry — to be shown at the Cill Rialaig Art Centre in Ballinskelligs. This is the first stage of a plan to show work in a municipal space. The places she has chosen to draw, paint and sketch are full of a strange energy, almost a kind of magic, and are, she says, ‘very healing’. “This is where the ancient Gaels, or Milesians, came in, they landed at Ballinskelligs Bay in 1700BC. When they saw this beautiful country, the rich land, the mild climate, the sea full of fish, they embraced it.” She quotes John Moriarty, the Kerry philosopher, saying that “. . . all that was divine in the land retreated to the grave-mounds and to the lonely places.” These lonely places are what compel Susan. Spots where “the land shimmers and you feel this extraordinary quality.”
“People are waking up to this. The Irish always had this sense — they would leave the fairy mounds alone, the single hawthorns, but I think it is more pronounced now. There is more understanding, another dimension of awareness is opening up, that we are more complex, and that we need more.”
The work is the result of a fasci- nation that began, for Susan, in 2003 when she first came to the Iveragh Peninsula, and felt a connection so strong that she believes, is certain, that she has been here before, thousands of years ago. But it has been in the last year that her determination really began to intensify.
“The year has been really tough,” she admits. “With Paolo, and the effect of that on the young ones” —the couple’s daughter, Isabella, and son Rocco. “I miss Paolo and so do the kids. Probably more than before. He’s still around us. Memories of his illness fade, and his spirit is more alive. It’s like he’s a guide now for us. Rocco is in Gallinaro now and will feel him very much there. And Bella’s new baby, the baby coming, is carrying some of that, we feel.”
Winter, for Susan, was a time of emotional reconciliation, but also of physical settling. “I spent a lot of time over the winter helping Rocco and Bella to get Paolo’s house ready to put on the market, clearing the stuff of 30 years. Everything had to be gone through and organised, and so much of it was my life too. The things I had left behind when I moved to Kerry in 2003. As I went through everything, I discovered that of course, I had never really left.”
Susan was born and brought up in Glenageary, one of five children (her sister, Diana, is married to Chris de Burgh; Paolo introduced them). Hers was a highly artistic family. One ancestor, John Henry Campbell, whose work can be found in the National Gallery, was a noted watercolourist, while his daughter, Cecilia Margaret Nairn, was the first woman to be exhibited in the RHA.
Susan and Paolo met on the steps of Trinity, introduced by Paul McGuinness. Paolo, born in Scotland, brought up in England but with a strong connection to the family in Gallinado, in Italy, had moved to Ireland in 1968. “We hit it off immediately,” Susan recalls. He was fascinating. There are some people who are at an advanced level of consciousness. We know them when we meet them, and Paolo was one. I married him because he was an extraordinary man.” For 30 years they were together, until the creative and emotional pull of Kerry was too strong for Susan to ignore and she moved from Wicklow. But theirs was a bond that was never severed, and in the last years of Paolo’s life, she travelled up to Wicklow, to be with him and care for him.
Work, for Susan, has been an escape from the pain of loss, but that pain has also been the inspiration behind her latest pieces. “The loss of that person into another dimension, the beloved going into a different place than the one we know, makes us want to explore that other reality. I think that’s what ancient ritual and ceremony was about. Connecting with the afterlife. Bereavement has opened me up to it more. I would say I started looking deeper into why things happen, why we’re here, what brings us to do things. I used to wonder why I had been driven to live and work here in Kerry; I think it’s that connection to the past, the way it felt so familiar.”
The year has brought yet another experience of death, but a very different, far gentler one, as Paolo’s mother, Irene, passed away last week on August 17 at the age of 94. “She was a great-grandmother, and died a calm and peaceful death at the end of a life well lived,” says Susan. “Paolo was her only child, and she adored him, and he was very good to her. He was there for her even when he wasn’t well. He would go and visit her after his dialysis, and it was hard, but he did it.”
Fundamentally, Susan believes, “We’re not really taught, as human beings. We’re turned loose and we have to figure it out for ourselves. And life is tough. We go through tough times, but there is a purpose to it all. Life knows more than we do, if we just relax and let it lead, stop resisting.” Ancient Ireland: Stone upon Stone, August 27-September 18th, the Cill Rialaig Art Centre. The exhibition will be opened by poet and translator Paddy Bushe. www.facebook.com/CillRialaigArtsCentre. www.artancientireland. com
‘Memories of his illness fade, and his spirit is more alive. It’s like he’s a guide’