Carol riding the crest of a wave with a hugely succesful career
FERGUS DENNEHY TALKS TO DINGLE-BASED ARTIST CAROL CRONIN ABOUT HER HUGELY SUCCESSFUL CAREER, HER STANDOUT MOMENTS FROM OVER THE YEARS AND HER AWAKENING LIVING ON THE GREAT BLASKET
WHILE she may be a Wicklow native by birth, long term artist extraordinaire in Dingle, Carol Cronin is now very much every inch an adopted Kerry woman.
To anyone who has seen her pieces, her relationship with the ocean forms the foundation of almost all of her work; it’s no surprise that this is the case what with Carol spending her free time as a child either drawing, painting or swimming in the sea.
Her relationship with the ocean was one that was to continue well into her adult years and one which incidentally - thanks to a very powerful short film called ‘ Take Me Swimming’ in which her art played a starring role - has led to her sitting across from me here in The
Kerryman office.
Going right back to the root of her creativity, Carol laughed when she recalled occasions from her youth when her father would sit both her brothers and sisters down to discuss what they were going to do in life. For her, she said she was never involved in these discussions.
“With me, it was never discussed because it was always quite obvious which way I was going to go,” she laughed.
“It wasn’t even what you could call a decision to become a professional artist. It was always just what I was and what I did. I was always an artist from the very beginning. It was never an option to consider anything else,” she said.
After a wonderful 10 years spent living in Amsterdam, Carol returned to Irish shores and little did she know that a simple weekend visit here to Kerry - more specifically the Great Blasket Island - would turn into so much more.
It was a visit that would form the basis for much of her style of painting for the rest of her career.
“I set foot on the Great Blasket and everything changed. It was a shocker for me because I hadn’t intended on coming back to Ireland at all. I just saw the place and I thought ‘ this is where I’m supposed to be’,” she said.
“I went back to Amsterdam, put everything in storage, I took a rucksack and moved onto the Blasket Island. I know it sounds ridiculous but it was the best thing that I ever did,” she continued.
“I stayed there from June until October. At this point, I’d stopped painting. Even though I’d been through college, I didn’t know anything. I couldn’t paint properly or well enough to capture it. So I went back to the very basics and I started drawing. I would draw the sea with pencil, which is quite a difficult thing to do. It makes you look and I would have been all the time wondering ‘ how would I paint that?’
“The technique that I still use today all stemmed from that time, from going back to the very beginning and re-starting again and re-learning how to use your materials,” she said.
After a brief sojourn showing her art at the Green Lane Gallery in Dingle and in Killarney, places where she said she was “delighted” to have her work featured, it was around this time that Carol said she started to feel a little disconnected.
“I would be in the studio, I’d get a phone call that would say ‘your painting is gone and your cheque’s on the way’ and that was it. For some reason, that just didn’t sit right with me,” she said.
Very quickly it was obvious to Carol that success to her wasn’t simply selling the work, she wanted something more and this eventually led to her opening up her own gallery on Green Street in Dingle back in 2005.
“Opening my own gallery was more to make more of a connection. I was curious as to where my paintings went to, who liked them, who bought them. I care about the paintings and I wanted to know where they were going in the world,” she said.
Describing her paintings of the sea which she is most known for, she said:
“Any scene that I was painting, it was the sea that kept pulling me. It’s such a difficult subject. There’s so many depths to it. The darks, the lights. I never paint from photos so for me, it’s more I always paintings that is more how you feel when you’re looking at the sea, rather than a photographic representation,” she said.
The sea, Carol says, evokes so many moments from her customers, sometimes without them realising they are doing it.
“It’s amazing how quickly people go from looking at my pictures, talking about to sea to talking about their emotions with me. It’s unbelievable how many conversations I’ve had about how people feel in the gallery. They’re big paintings, they are six foot by four foot, a lot of them. It’s on a big scale and you can totally get lost in them.”
“I paint on a scale like that because of the subject matter but what I didn’t expect was how many people are prepared to ship them all over the world.”
The majority of Carol’s paintings stay in Ireland - which she loves - but she says that around 30% of her work goes to places like US, Germany, Switzerland,.
“The amount of times that I’ll get emails and messages, two to four years after someone has bought a piece to say that ‘we’ve moved house, look at where the painting is now’. It’s surreal,” she laughed.
When pressed if there are any stand-out moments for her over the last decade-and-a-half, it was a meeting with a young man in her gallery that stands out as one of her more special moments.
“There was a young guy that came in one day. I used to see him around in Dingle and he’d have been in and around his early 20’s. He’d come in and he’d look at the paintings and he waited until I was finished talking to everyone else and he came up to me and said ‘I want to buy that painting.’”
“And he pointed at a painting that was around €5,000 and he was so young and I was a bit thrown. I said to him that he was the youngest person ever to buy an original painting.”
“One day, he’d gone down to buy his lunch and he’s bought a lottery ticket and he’d scratched three stars and he ended up on one of those gameshows where he’d won €45,000. He was heading back home and he couldn’t stop smiling.
For someone who measures success in achieving connection with another human being through her art, I don’t think it could get any better than this for Carol.
To see more of Carol’s work, head over to her website at www. carolcronin.com or even better, call into her gallery for a chat and a browse!
I set foot on the Great Blasket and everything changed. I just saw the place and I thought ‘this is where I’m supposed to be’.