Heartlands
Exhibition of Paintings
by David Clarke
Jan 12th - Feb 1st 2001
Official Opening by Michael D. Higgins
Notes by David Clarke
Almost all the pictures in this exhibition have been painted in the last ten years. For many years before that I lived in Texas, but never felt spiritually at home, the well was always dry. I painted images of escape – scenes from deep in the cosmos, humming-birds flying in the stratosphere, never places. I had to come back to Ireland; it was like a hunger. Every day since I came back, I realise how much I love this country, its people, the smell of the air, and above all, my heartlands, which I first discovered as a young man. They still act like a magnet on me, places where the well is always full.
Derryclare and I first became acquainted when friends and I took a horse-drawn caravan from Dublin to Connemara. The better I know it, the deeper my love for it. It has a presence, companionable and moody as a person.
It was on Inis Oirr that my parents fell in love, during one of the many summers they shared there with fellow art students. I went on a pilgrimage to the island some years ago. In four dark days the sun shone with a brilliant intensity for just a few hours. I walked by the beach and looking into the rock-pools, became fascinated by the reflections of light on the water, in the water and under the water, on the sand. It's impossible to see where surface glitter ends and depth begins. I started thinking "how do you paint that?" I knew it couldn't be done accurately but accuracy always seems to me to miss the point.
The great open barren space between mountaintops, from the Sally Gap towards Glenmacnass, is my local heartland, a joy in all seasons. I was excited by the similarities and differences between the blue-green pools of Inis Oirr and the rich amber pools of the mountain bog streams, where sunlight seems to turn stones into carelessly scattered treasure.
Coming back, again and again, to the Blaskets, is always like coming home. There is a unique spiritual quality about this grouping of five islands, especially about the Great Blasket, the mother-island. I get a feeling of harmony and peace when I'm there, the solitariness of humanity seems to be suspended. I never tire of watching the weather forming over the islands, or the sun sinking behind the startling little peak, Tiaracht, on the far horizon, beacon to the world beyond, a kind of Hy-Brasil.
I always wonder what it's like on the far side of the Blaskets, or on Tiaracht, but I won't go and see, I prefer to wonder.
I have never seen the Atlantic in such turmoil as at Clogher Strand. The sign warning of the dangers of swimming there seems to be a little odd, when you look at the terrifying, beautiful power of these waves.
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