Painting Flashback

The wind has come up fierce and ferocious today thrashing the bog cotton about like a classroom of wicked boys. It chased out the heat wave long before dawn. Instead of Tuscany I am back to Mayo. And here comes the rain to prove it, hard on the heels of the wind. It’s rattling round the window pane again as it was all winter. It strikes the glass like a shotgun blast. I had to run outside in my slippers and tie up the sunflowers in the flower bed; otherwise they’d have gone cart wheeling off over the turf like windmills.

I like it, this wind. It is July now, but it blows like winter. It blows through the cracks under the door and through the casements and right up my nose and I breath it into my brain. I can go back to the writing now with a head full of oxygen.

So that is a relief.

I thought I might die of guilt, spending all my time painting like that.

If there is a problem at all it is that I am obsessive. I came here to write, alone in this cottage with myself and the bogs and the boharins, swept in by the wind and the memories and the urgent need to get it all off my chest after sixty years of waiting.

But for the past month and two days, instead of writing I have been painting. They are great big unwieldy pictures on sheets of builder’s hardboard I bought water-damaged and at half-price from the hardware store in Kilkelly. Suddenly I wish to be Gauguin and Monet and Edward Hopper and Magritte and all at once and instantly and even so in my own unique spirit. And if I can’t get there within the hour, then it must be at least by the end of the month. After thirty three days there are so many masterpieces they will hardly fit into this neatly ordered universe. The cottage is bulging like a museum basement.

I have been painting night and day. Until today. The weather invited it. There has been a heat wave over Europe and it brought rare and reflected sunshine over Ireland. I have stood outside at the back door and painted everything I can see in all directions. I have captured every visible scene and many visible only to me and splashed so much paint around and about that the very ground begins to resemble something from the Museum of Modern Art and I am wading about in colour.

It has been a strange experience.

Since Miss Maggs beat the art out of me I had not thought about painting at all. I have done other things entirely with my life. And after all of that, I came here to write, for this is a place to stop living and give oneself over to reflection and perhaps death, or at least reflection about death.

It is a great palette itself of wild flowers and weather. Time here is not stopped, but it continues to move endlessly, revolving in the past. I think in Swinford, the 1950’s is the nearest it gets to today. I am at home here as I am at home in museums. They are full of what was once the familiar. That time is more real to me than the one that has come since. After all, I was alive then. Now I seem just to be tidying up after the party.

You see I am not reconciled to age. Sickness forces me to think about it, but only the numbers tell me the bad news, and numbers are only theoretical. Miss Maggs impressed on me their paramount importance and so I decided to delete them at once. I still look at a blackberry vine with the same emotion I looked at it in Polzeath but I do not count the thorns.