At the Edge of Ireland (36 page)

 

J
OHN
B
RENNAN WAS A
bald, bright-eyed, young-looking man who seemed to relish the uncertainty of the “creative process.” A half-hour PowerPoint presentation of his artworks seemed to enthrall the hundred or so locals in the audience. He stirred up chuckles and giggles with his references to “hours spent just looking at a painting and wondering where to go next” and “I always try to keep a number of canvases going simultaneously so I don't get bored.” He emphasized that he was talking about paintings, not people, although he admitted he had a “low threshold for tolerance of sameness.” And yet—superficially at least—there seemed to be a great deal of “sameness” about his colored boxes paintings. He suggested his variations were subtle and “not always immediately apparent” and the audience seemed to agree. However, the notes he used to describe his explorations of his abstract genre helped clarify the process:

What and how to paint? Imagery. Inventing a vocabulary for a wordless world. The process of designing and then selecting the most appropriate image to convey a given word, an adjective…There are no words, no representational imagery to guide us toward a possible meaning…Do these shapes have a certain resonance for us and does this affect how we react…Would an irregular shape be more potent and also open to wider interpretation…Is it really possible to communicate “a specific feeling” or “an experience” by such simple or abstract means…Unlike a writer, I do not have a plot or outline to begin, only a starting point…Thus begins a journey of discovery, elimination, and of decision-making…My shapes are my characters…I cajole and mold them and the shapes evolve in color and form…I'm always altering the direction the painting could take and maybe taking the road less traveled…until I am left in no doubt that the shapes I select work collectively within the confines of the canvas…I'm always working towards the unknown.

What could have been a load of effetist mumbo jumbo and aesthetic gobbledygook became instead a courageous revelation of one artist's tenuous search for meaning and significance in totally abstract terms using nothing but color, simple random shapes, and the critical spaces in between. Most artists prefer not to (or maybe just can't) explain their own creative mazes. Maybe, in many instances, there's not that much to explain anyway. In a lot of contemporary art, one senses an arrogant dismissive “you either get it or you don't” or “whatever it means to you is what it means” attitude on the part of so-called artists. But John, who had a permanent exhibition of his work at the Mill Cove Gallery just east of Castletownbere, was open, honest, and obviously beguiled by the vagaries and vastness of the abstract “creative process.”

Admittedly, his audience seemed more beguiled as he showed how sometimes his abstracts morphed almost unintentionally into semirepresentational works, most notably dramatic seascapes of churning, writhing waves with maybe just a hint of land at the far edges of the canvas.

“You can tell how living here on Beara can create this kind of response,” he said, smiling. “You're surrounded by the ocean. Its sound, its fury, its ever-changing moods and its dominant power…They all get inside and eventually emerge in my paintings, sometimes when I least expect it…In my sea paintings I'm trying to combine a certain balance of realism and abstraction. I'm also looking for a sense of timelessness in the colors and forms. I don't want it to be a particular time of day. I want it to be…eternal…transcendent beyond just sea paintings into something else…something more enduring…intriguing…fascinating.”

And it was indeed fascinating to share John's fascination. He seemed, like many fine artists, to be blending the dual capacities of standing deeply within his own mind and artistry and yet far outside the source of the stimulation—seeing it objectively almost as the Creator Him/Herself might see it. And trying to express, in James Joyce's words, “the particular in the universal” (and vice versa).

The second artist of the evening, Jeannie Richardson, was an intriguing study in contrasts. She was frail, shy, and soft-spoken and seemed to have great difficulty with the PowerPoint system. For a moment she looked so flummoxed and uncomfortable that I thought she'd hastily apologize and flee from the stage. But she didn't. And the audience applauded her spontaneously just for staying put. And I for one was delighted that she had, because her life and art were so beguilingly different from John Brennan's. She made no references to “juxtaposed abstracts,” “nonrepresentational imagery,” “spatial illusions,” and “unresolved states.” Instead she merely showed a sequence of her highly realistic work of animals, plants, and vegetables, and Vermeer-like still-life watercolors. And while it looked as if she might be tantalizingly close at times to producing Hallmark-type illustrations, she always seemed to manipulate composition, color, and moods of great calm in such a subtle way that you sensed layerings of perceptions and meanings in even the simplest of her subjects.

Sculpture at Mill Cove Gallery

Someone in the audience tried to express that feeling, but while Jeannie was obviously moved, she dismissed the remarks with a blush and an “oh no…I just paint what I put in front of me.”

It would indeed be refreshing to hear such modesty from “artists” with far less talent and clarity of vision. But I guess “the less talent you possess, the more you've got to hawk the runty-bit of it around,” as a cynical editor-friend of mine once remarked when yet one more hacked-out, Harlequin-type horror-romance, as he called them, hit the top of the fiction best-seller lists in the
New York Times
.

And Sue Booth-Forbes knows plenty about best-seller lists from her experiences “in another life,” with writing, writers, editing, and publishers. We hope her intimate “Soul Friend” nexus here on the peninsula continues to nurture needy creative spirits and forces for years to come. In many ways this is a key to Beara's future and its power as a muse-releasing, spirit-nurturing, soul-healing focal point. It's either that or the dreaded Ring of Kerry–type road-widening threats and bumper-to-bumper tour buses.

And for most who live here, from long-lineage families to blissful blow-ins, that's not even an option.

T
HE BAR HAD A FIREPLACE—A
mean bundle of misshapen fieldstone rocks seemingly dumped in the corner of the room. But at least it had a fire in it, which was something of a welcome sight on that unusually chilly and blustery market/day evening in Bantry. Not much of a fire, though—it crackled and hissed and nudged out reluctant curlicues of smoke and halfhearted insipid-colored flames. The ones you expect to vanish any moment and be replaced by big black sighs of soot. Not that I cared really what they did. I'd come in with a “by your leave, good landlord” just to use the facilities and then make a hasty getaway before the market traffic clogged the winding road all the way back to Glengarriff.

But, of course, things didn't quite work out that way. They rarely do. The facilities were fine…well no, actually, that's a downright lie. The facilities were unbelievably awful and enough to put you off your corned beef and cabbage for life, but when in need, etc., etc.

I was heading back to the main door when I realized that the room with the fire in it, which I would swear was empty when I'd arrived a few minutes earlier, was now occupied by the oddest trio of gentlemen it has ever been my good fortune to meet on a Bantry market day. Or any other day in Bantry, for that matter. Or anywhere else, come to think of it.

Their appearance and demeanor, to put it mildly, were utterly contradictory to the spirit and scope of their utterances. The small one by the fire, who seemed lost in his own coal-warmed world, suddenly gave out a sonorous bellow like an angry walrus. The other two didn't seem the least surprised by either the nature or volume of the explosive outburst. Even the barman seemed unperturbed. In fact he seemed blankly glass-eyed—almost taxidermied—until someone ordered drinks. Then he merely looked up from his studious pulling of a pint of the black stuff, smiled in a slightly doleful way, winked at me, shook his balding head, and lowered it again to supervise the slow filling of the glass.

The man by the fire then gave a second, less emphatic bellow and slowly looked around the room, as if to ascertain who was emitting such odd, nonverbal utterances. The other two men ceased their whispered chatter and turned to watch the smaller man.

“Y'see—dammit—the problem is…NO ONE KNOWS HOW TO WRITE ANYMORE! They're either trying desperately to be different so their stuff comes out all self-conscious and self-important…or they're imitating other writers—or a pastiche of other writers—they become sycophants of style like they've been on one of those asinine creative writing courses…Couldn't tell a decent
seanachai
tale to save their…male appendages. Assumin' they have any…”

“Ah, but—” started the middle gentleman, his face rosy and his whiskey nose resplendently purple.

“No, no, no!” said the third, sprawling in a small wooden chair that looked dangerously close to imminent implosion. I began to sense I had emerged into a minor maelstrom of misunderstanding.

But the grammar-garbling gentleman by the fire would not be stopped. In a voice I can liken only to that of a frenetic Yorkshire terrier on an acid trip gone wrong, and with his fingers skittering nervously like trapped mice, he ignored his companions, or at least he silenced them by loudly repeating his last phrase before the interruptions had barely begun: “…ASININE CREATIVE WRITING COURSES…” He paused long enough to regain the attention of the other two (with not a scintilla of pleasantly congenial propinquity) and then continued: “I think it was that American writer George Kerouac…”

“Jack,” mumbled the man in the middle.

“Beg pardon?”

“Jack…His name was Jack Kerouac.”

“You sure?”

“Sure he's sure and so am I. Jack was his name,” said the sprawling man. “What's y' point?”

“MY POINT IS”—the little man by the fire repeated his attention-grabbing, capitalized semishout—“my point is that Mr. Kerouac—Jack or George—whatever—once declared that when you write you should forget all rules, literary styles, and other pretensions and write as if you were the first person ever to live on earth!”

“He said that, did he?” said the man in the middle after the three had sat through a mutually meditative pause in the proceedings.

“Yes. He did. And I think he's definitely got a point…”

“Ow!” shouted the sprawling man. The middle man chuckled. The man by the fire looked at the sprawling man.

“What's wrong with you then?”

The sprawling man couldn't resist a little jesty pun: “I just got your point…and it hurts!” He laughed at his own wit, and the middle man joined in. The man by the fire was not amused. He glowered with an almost reptilian intensity: “Waste o' my bloody breath, w' you two. Here I am tryin' to add a little elucidation to your lives and all you can do is josh around like a couple o' bloody school kids! You're both sufferin' badly from bovine spongiform encephalopathy—otherwise known as ‘mad cow disease'—otherwise known as holes in y' tiny brains!” He looked as sad as a soggy crouton in a bowl of cold, greasy soup.

The man in the middle eased forward, as if about to rise to collect another round of drinks. Then he seemed to change his mind and adopted a ruminative tone: “I assume you've heard what little Truman Capote once said of Kerouac's fiction: ‘That's not writing—that's typing'! Anyway…I think many of our finest Irish writers have some of that sense…writing as if you were seeing things new…for the first time. And even Welshmen do too! People like Dylan Thomas—oh, good lord—he must have really been an Irishman with all that paddywackery poetry in his veins and that rumbly humor and that rhythm with his words…and that lovely chocolaty voice—I can hear him now reading from his
Under Milk Wood
. Y'remember how it goes—‘It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched courters'-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea. Ah. Such lovely stuff.'”

“Oh yes…now that's language indeed…,” said the sprawling man. “Old Dylan could make changin' gloppy motor oil sound as sensual as suckin' on a fine, fat peach!”