Two Sligo Painters

Opening Speech by Dermot Healy

The reason I've been asked to open this exhibition is not because I know anything about art but because the three of us live within the same area in the North-West of Sligo. Within a few minutes of each other. And like all people that live close to each other we don't see each other all that often. But despite that, one of them is after my house, the other is after my donkeys. Your man Delargy, after renting a couple of houses, is about to build on a site on a peninsula above me. Sean works down the road in the primary school that his mother went to. Some days he might be painting a canvas where she exactly sat a generation ago doing her sums. I'm above on the cliff in Ballyconnell, overlooking the shoreline that gives its name to some of the work here by Mr McSweeney, and Mr McSweeney believes he should be in my house. That the good view is wasted on me. Writers, he said, like yourself and Leland Bardwell, are stealing all the scenery. It was through him I got my cottage but now he wants it back. And of course he doesn't. But I tried my best to placate him.

I was going off for a couple of weeks a few years ago and I lent him the keys. In part to look after a dog who thinks he's a guide for Bord Fáilte. Sean was kind-of reluctant, and yet happy enough, to move out when I came back. But there was worse to come. I found out after he'd gone that he'd inadvertently - I'll put that in inverted commas- locked the bloomin' cat in my study. The pong was something terrible. I thought, he said afterwards, that I smelt something strange as I was passing the study. So did I. It's a conspiracy. Mc Sweeney is bad but Delargy is worse. You see the 2 asses I have think Dermot Delargy is their boss. That's because the Delargys make superior pastas.

When they moved into the area first they used to drop off vegetables and the leavings of meals for the donkeys. It started out as charity and then it became an outing. Every couple of days the roaring would start in the back field as the car came up the lane. They saw the car, himself and herself and the children, and thought ah there's the food people. Good people. The asses would leave our carrots and the potatoes to one side and dig into the spagetti. Then the Delargys moved further away from us and the visits stopped a couple of years ago. The asses became lonely. Then the Delargy family reapppeared again last week to give me some notes for this exhibition, and the two donkeys, reared up and roared. There's the ones that make the lovely pastas!

I first met Dermot Delargy above in Belfast. It was at a party. I have a vague memory that someone fell asleep on a couch and they tied together the laces of both boots. I'm not saying who. When the poor bugger got up he toppled over. It was a shameful act. There was another painter called Dermot at that party - Dermot Seymour. We three got on well enough because we didn't have to remember our Christian names which helps when you're drinking, though over the years it can be a bit of a problem when someone calls out a name and three people answer like flirts.

It was in Belfast too that I had my first real physical encounter with art when one of Seymour's paintings broke my nose. I was minding it for him. I was taking it down off the wall, the cord gave, and wham. That's why I look like I do. I was given this puss by a painter. Painters are always looking for models, even when it happens randomly. Dermot moves through the whole visual process. He is renowned as a technician, printmaker and innovator. And as a painter. But it's like me - people say give up the poetry, stick to the novels, give up the novels and stick to the poetry, and as for the plays. No way.

Mister Delargy is acutely physical in his rendering of data, like out come the hands to explain a sharks fin, and yet he quietly spreads shadows that slowly turn to colour in your memory afterwards. He hides behind the mute. He is a tonal craftsman. He always reminds me of Don Quoitie heading off on another journey with another fellow on board. He walks into the shades of Beckett without a backward look, can illustrate Paul Muldoon's verse with lovely asides, sups with the greats like Goya and Velasquez, (Something he didn't want me to mention) now after a sexy period with the nude, - his wife thinks he's sexy - he has turned to the shark. Or another way of putting it - the shark has come up out of memory to him. Out of his childhood. And into his adulthood.

He saw one his children drawing something. When he looked at what it was he saw these sharp teeth of the shark and then he remembered all the times he'd seen children draw sharks, or something like sharks, and it struck him that there was a primal signal in that wish to draw fear, to capture a terrifying beast they'd probably never seen in real life but were haunted by. As he was in his time. A lot of his work is stirred by things he saw as a child, like Lenegan's kitchen, with its candle, table, and chair, a place he visited when young, and which then revisited him later as a painter. So he set out on his series of sharks, read their history and then found out that they were, despite remaining fixed in the imagination, actually on the crest of extinction.Because of dwindling fish stocks in the sea, and for the sake of their fins in soup, and man's craving for aphrodisiacs and fertility, the shark is badly threatened. I know they were not liked out at sea. The rifle was never very far away on the trawlers. I remember once hauling in a net and as it came up out of the water with this fine salmon in it there was leap to my right and quick as anything I saw the jaws open, mister salmon was gone and the shark shot down into the water to my left. It only took a second. I never leaned out over the boat when hauling in again.

In his research Dermot read somewhere that the shark is a perfect beast. Nature has perfected them, and they cannot be improved. As an animal they had all they needed to survive and remained unchanged physically over thousands of years, a million the oceanographers say, whether on the surface or down in the depths, and sometimes blind; but now seemingly the shark may be no more. Instead of the living beast rising up with his teeth in a child's imagination, he'll become a dead relic in a museum. Dermot Delargy is on a mission. It's a lament for the shark. He knows the danger does not come from the shark, but from man. He's down swimming among the sharks with his oils. All the fish are indoors. With the painter evoking the spent life. Hence the painter's palette beside the dead fish in Untitled No. 1, Oil on Board.

There is a sadness behind the exoticism. Both are full of colour but one is lifeless. He did not evoke them, as it were at sea, yet nearly all of his work on this animal was done out at Inisheer. The Galway connection. I wish him, and the shark, well in these new beautiful works.

I rang up Sean Mc Sweeney to ask him about this exhibition and instead he started to tell me about a bull-finch and his mate that had settled into a broken light fixture outside his studio, and each time they finished their lovemaking the bullfinch would hop out and clean his beak over and back on the wire. Why does he do that, asked Sean, cleaning his beak, of all things. I had no answer. But as Shelia, Sean's wife said when I asked her to sum him up, well I suppose Sean is a man in touch with nature. Another sexy man. In touch with nature. And this is true. I was doing an interview with Mr McSweeney once and he said something that stayed with me. That when he lived above in Wicklow he used look up, but that since he moved to Sligo he looked down. After years of looking at mountains, he found the model - the actual landscape - was no longer standing up, but lying down. Then I began to look again at his pictures of bog pools and his rock pools. On the walls the pictures could look abstract, like someone like Rothko, but put them down on the ground and look down into them and there is a real pool - buoyant with colour and life - at your feet. In the area where we live there are a lots of bog pools. The bogs were dug out and left abandoned. Rain and wet seeped into them. He took me round the pools one day to show me the new life that had emerged. The bog beans had begun to sprout, there were yellow splashes of wild marigold, bright green mosses stirred underwater in a pool of short white-tipped stickreeds, lily pads floated on their map of water, last years bullrushes were snapped in half and the heads were balding, and the tough leaves of the wild irises (called flags locally) were striking straight up. His wild garden, he called the bog pools. They are where he makes his first scratches, and if he's lost his way its where he comes to find it again. It was a revelation to me. So I called him the bogman, and like all bogmen he wanders the beach as well looking for the wonders.

In the shorelines here he is not looking down, but out there beyond him with a kind of friendly wonder. Shorelines, where the waters meet the land, constantly occur in his work. Sometimes it is only a trembling line of blue or yellow, sometimes it's in a haze, with the line hardly visible, only a slight wash of white across the silence of the blues. And in fact, looking at this work here, and remembering his other work, sometimes I think he's painting the weather, and what weather does to colour and growth. And since weather changes with the time of year you'll find the time of year in many of his titles: April Pool, March Bogland Pool, May Pool, Spring Bogland, Winter Shoreline, Evening Shoreline He's seasonal.

Where we are in time counts, what season we are in, what month, even what time of day; to do some of the work here he went out onto the landscape with his watercolour pad; To Inishmurray Island for Island Fields: Down to Ballyconnell for his shoreline and look up at the house with a vagrant eye; In the three pieces May Pool, Spring Bogland and April Pool, he took his actual watercolours down into the bog and finished the work there; sometimes he makes a small drawing; brings it back to his studio in the school; returns again maybe next day, notes the changes, and so the little work grows: one day is made different than the other through how the light falls. Even in the studio pieces you can feel the weather and the time of year. So these small works here are like a visual diary. Of a place, but also of what is happening in the place; breezes, the shadows, the rocks, the sound. The sandflies. It's an exact moment in time but time is passing. Maybe too another subject of Sean McSweeney's is time: he is trying to paint the weight of time. He is gazing at absence, and at the same time recording nature's playfulness. I'm not supposed to say the word beautiful twice, but I will. It's beautiful work.

Out beyond at sea is the shark, on the shore the bogman. Both disappearing. Watch out for them. These artists are making records for us. It's good to see the two of them housed in the one gallery. And the catalogue is a credit. Thank you.

Dermot Healy