One day soon I must paint something big and red. Otherwise what were they for, these pricey tubes of alizarin and cadmium red deep? A little alizarin goes a long way, like purple blood. I could leak some into a bog painting just now, for the smouldering hues of November. Or do some crimson fields for drama – I’ve always had trouble with greens.
These overexuberant tubes of red are as good as when I bought them, almost 40 years ago, stocking up in Kennedy’s of Harcourt Street for the big move west.
So are most of the wood-carving chisels for the driftwood sculptures I thought I might do, and the grits for polishing beach pebbles in a barrel spun by the stream (no end to creativity once my time was all my own).
A modest graphic talent had been nagging since childhood, along with the rush of pleasure in colour and form. In my newspaper years I spent lunchtimes in the Dublin galleries, being happily tutored by my art-critic colleague and friend Brian Fallon. I hung around real painters, let them tell me to stick with what I was good at. Real painters don't spend their lives spinning words; they put paint first.
The big deal about moving west was not, of course, just the urge to self-taught self-expression but a hazard at surviving somewhere beautiful. (Much the same thing, it might be said.) But discovering that days were finite, after all, was the first big reckoning of the “alternative” lifestyle. The priority was feeding a family, taming an acre and mastering spillet and sleán. Only many years later, sans goats, hens and bees, did I finally get down to painting.
This was not without further procrastination, probably born of fear. Our riveting landscape was prodigiously unpaintable – you’d need a canvas like a Cinemascope screen. What could you do with these great sweeps of sand, sea and sky, with not a decent vertical in sight? Looking the other way, to the hills, there were all these miserable greens, either offensively dead on the canvas or far too shrill with nitrogen fertiliser. Besides, I had still had “nowhere” to paint (now at one end of a little room shared with seed box, chainsaw, computer and whatever else needs a home).
But then, once, I accompanied a real painter, Derek Hill, to an island where, perched on a stool, he captured a landscape of barest essentials – a glimmering line of sand between sea and sky, a single cloud rising from a dull hill – conjuring immensities of light and distance on the back of a cigar-box lid eight inches by six.
The impressionists pioneered painting outdoors and didn't seem to mind the light changing every five minutes. I don't know what David Hockney does about midges (perhaps that's why he's gone so digital). And I admire Scotland's great Joan Eardley, lugging huge canvases to paint the waves, her easel lashed against the wind. After a few dogged expeditions, my box easel loaded with paints and hefted from one hand to another, I settled for sketches, photographs and memories of light – or whatever was framed by a window.
Even set free to work on a Monday or Thursday I remain essentially a captive “Sunday” painter, shackled to scenery and painting stuff more or less as it looks.
I have fits of disillusion at failing to find any personal vision: something arousingly beyond what's simply there. In the age of the iPad camera where's the point in rehashing Paul Henry or Corot, not to mention half Combridge's window, when the power and dark magic of the west lie in the mind and eye of a Seán McSweeney or Brian Bourke? They are real painters; always were. Without nature they would be lost – but nature reborn as art.
There have never been more real painters in this country thanks to the cultural aspirations of Charles Haughey. He was Medici or Malraux, perhaps a bit of both, and his tax reliefs and open regard for art helped nourish a transfusion of aesthetic sensibility. This put paintings into gallery windows in every small town and tourist village. And if a lot of them spring from self-taught Sunday industry, their bright enjoyment and effort enrich the national psyche.
All kinds of prominent people surprise us with a private passion for painting. Here in Mayo it has been almost a political freemasonry, engaging, among others, President Hillery, the late John Healy and the current Pádraig Flynn.
My own offering today is of Doolough Pass, beyond the mountain, in theatrical winter light. It was done with a palette knife, if that matters – one way of dealing with what a GP friend had the nerve to tell me is “senile tremor” in the hands. Which is fine so long as you can still aim straight.