The benefits of not having a filing system...
IN the Gallery setting, there are many benefits to having no understandable filing or storage system, not least like finding £100 in a long-forgotten apron pocket but, the most exciting advantage of my tardiness, is the discovery of old friends in the form of words and pictures.
Take this from the morning of National Poetry Day earlier this month, when I was looking for inspiration, I found a photograph of a beautiful old doorway in the far east of France, and although there was no cat in my original photograph, this little chap was spotted further along the road climbing out of a roof-light.
Artistic licence at its best. First the scene is painted in acrylic paints, then oil pastel is applied to parts of the painting, before being scratched with the scraper to reveal the colour beneath, and in my new series, there is always a realistic vignette, in this case the door.
Next up appeared five A3 laminated sheets of poetry which had accompanied one of my exhibitions at the Central Art Gallery in Ashton.
The exhibition, ‘Oileán Máisean,’ was my personal interpretation of a tiny uninhabited island off the coast of Connemara, Co Galway.
I wrote the verses in 1997 but, I know exactly when the exhibition was, as it opened on the day that my daughter, Niamh, was born 16 years ago.
You see how one thing leads to another, and reminds me of something the poet, Kahlil Gibran, when he said... ‘I meant to do my work today but, a brown bird sang in the apple tree..’
What a great line, which in some ways sums up my life in a sentence. My poem begins...
When the cuckoo is set fair for Africa, and her deeds on Máisean are done,
Her fledgling offspring will sit and wait
And make their own way South to September lands
If the gulls who sit as kings among the grasses
Like penguins, unperturbed by man, do not dine first.
I go on to describe the views, whistling otters and ancient shell-middens where Neolithic man held the first barbecues with limpets and mussels seven thousand years earlier.
Inevitably when writing poetry, one is drawn to your own thoughts and feelings.
I’ll leave you with the French Cat and this, from the heartland.
With the worried gait of a sanderling I paced the shoreline of broken shells,
And watched as the tide, played tricks with my sensibilities, as white stallions
Carried my twins of hope to my arms once more and set fire to a sense of wonder;
And then I understood, our lives would never be the same again,
And nowhere else, could ever be so beautiful.
The poems and paintings now form part of a permanent exhibition at the Laughing Badger; the two go hand in hand.
All readers are welcome to come over the hill for a look.
Give me a shout on 07736 175866 to make sure I’m not off gallivanting somewhere.