Getting to Know Brud

When you stare at an old photo of someone for long enough it sometimes seems that you're getting to know them. After several leads came up with nothing, for my painting of Brud Petty I had to use the picture lent to me by Bridey Fitzpatrick. In it a youthful Brud - perhaps no more than 20 years old - stares back at me, grinning wildly. It must have been taken in the 30s or 40s at a guess.

Looking for Photographs of Old People

Talked to some more local people today about the project. Mattie Shannon is a nephew of Maudie, the old lady who used to live at the crossroads at the bottom of the hill. I asked him about photos but he seemed to think there were no surviving photographs of her. He told me to call back next week and he'd do a bit of research in the meantime.

After that I popped round to see Mikey Carthy (who's 80 and has lived here all his life). Mikey wasn't in and had some tough looking guard cats on patrol outside the cottage. Further down the road I bumped into Pat Woods, a local farmer, and he was happy to talk about the project. He seemed to know a lot about the families who lived around here. "There's not much to say about Maudey and Tadey," he said, "apart from the fact that they lived in those cottages". As for pictures, he reckoned that "families didn't take photographs of themselves in those days. You hired people to do that." He suggested Buddy Flanagan in Doolin might have some old prints. It does seem that the more I dig for these old people, the more they disappear from view.

Finally I visited John Casey, an auctioneer in Lisdoonvarna, who used to be good friends with Brud Petty and who said he had both photos and VHS records of Brud.

Holy well and JCB

This week I'm going to draw up a list of local people that I need to talk to and try and get hold of some archive material. A trip to the local history archive in Ennis is probably on the cards at some point. But for now I'm going to walk around the lanes with my sketchbook and attempt to fit evertything together.

As well as documentary stuff about the old pople I want to emphasise my own motivations and response to Lurraga. The general theory round here is that I probably tend to romanticise the landscape more than any of the people who actually work on the land. It brings me back to the idea of the classic travel writing tradition - there is a whiff of colonialsim about an Englishman documenting scenes of Irish rural life. That fascination with otherness. I've just got to be open about that.

The images I have in my head at the moment are of a farmer cutting the hay with a scythe, a holy well and a great big bright yellow JCB.

How Owning Crap Land Can Have A Negative Impact On Your Sex Life

Bachelors Walk is the nickname given to a small area to the north of Doolin, at the the junction between Cahermaccrusheen and Lurraga. Up until fifteen years ago it was inhabited mostly by unmarried farmers. Nearly all of them have died in the last decade and the area has changed as young families have moved in.

The exhibition will focus on this tiny portion of North Clare - just a few fields - as a way of highlighting wider demographic changes in the countryside. I wanted to explore the lost world that these people inhabited, a world that existed not much more than ten years ago but which now seems to have vanished forever. I’m also interested in exploring how that past resurfaces in (and influences) the lives of the current inhabitants.

The exhibition will consist of paintings of the old people who used to live in the area and some of the modern day bachelors, as well as sketches and paintings of the people who now live and work there. There will also be digital illustrations of maps and geological diagrams, plus some images of text and drawings of local stories and songs.

An Exhibitionist Writes

My proposal for an exhibition has been accepted. It’s great news and I should be jumping around the house playing a trombone or something. However, like last May, I’m suffering from wind headaches, which only come when the south westerlies hit gale force. It means that some parts of my brain don’t function properly and I can only concentrate on one thing at once. The pains usually come whenever the lid blows off the compost bin. I haven’t yet worked out the connection here, though possibly the compost bin and I have merged on some sort of sub-atomic level (kind of like in the Third Policeman).

Anyway, the exhibition is called Bachelors Walk and is an art/social/personal investigation of Lurraga, the small townland where we live. Opening night is to be June 22nd. That means I’ve got six weeks to get it all together.