Once you are in love you want to protect your loved one.

The Making of a Dream

Come with me into the field a moment; a wilding, restoring, thriving place. It’s here that I understand that I am a painter and that it is my job to observe this wild symphony of life unfolding, circle round it with charcoal and paint. Share with me some sight of it, an iteration, a version, some entangled path of feeling and understanding our part in the play of Nature. Because it is much too much to consider all at once or to consider all alone. We humans are so permeable to what is put before us. To put before us invitations to rest in our human-earth relationship whether through being in nature or through art’s language; it arcs its way into our hearts oftentimes when other ways are impervious. Isn’t it wise, considerate, necessary, to do so? We have been a long time coming back round to seeing what is missing. And it may be a long time yet before we carry the true heft of what is lost, being lost, and will be lost, in a way that is honorable; that we could know how to approach the dawn.

I have tried a few times now to make this page worthy of your attention and I have been distracted one way or another, a hurricane, a lost studio, an election, covid, a tumultuous amount of change. But I am here now and I want to share that it is my experience — through years of consistently making art within, and with attention to, Nature — that I have completely and most wholeheartedly fallen in love with Earth. It is my upmost task now to create paintings ensouled with this experience that speak of how we are attached. Take a seed and the moon, for instance. That something so small can tilt towards light through the dark soil and the night. Am I dreaming that my paintings can be like this — become dwellings, places to lay down before, or within, your imagination? Indeed, could they serve as sparks that manifest, markers of where you can and could be, and what is possible to hold? Perhaps a kind of eco altar, an icon, a doorway between what was and what is possible. They are an interplay of light and dark in the cycles of life, that universal generosity and mystery that pulls birth out of death, beauty out of pain. And these paintings could be described as romantic, and I, am romantic in my notions. I’ll say yes to that because I do believe they are romantic paintings and the love in them is fierce. And I am stunned by how depreciated this natural love can be culturally.

I bide my love between Asheville NC and the West of Ireland where I was born. My migration pattern has been set — along with a woeful carbon footprint — so that I can see the people and places I love on both sides of the Atlantic. It was with such a pure bold strike of luck that I found Nead Fáinleoige/Swallows Rest, an Irish cottage built in the vernacular of the late 1800s. It was within our budget and we could see its possibilities as a home for a larger vision. It would be a seed. We will restore this place to its original glory over the next few summer visits and add on a studio. We have already liberated the lawn and meadow, now a sea of wildflowers and grasses and the humming life that attires, growing in number by the year. We are lovingly imagining what we can offer to it. It is a place from which to watch a wild world grow and make art from and I can say with full admission I do believe it is a place that is glad to be itself. It is also a place from which I can hold a dream of something bigger. With growing interest and appreciation in my work, it felt possible for us to take such a step and to imagine that my business could grow even more to such an extent that could acquire more land there and create space for others to experience the full quality of their restored and reconnected Nature. I envisage a centre dedicated to eco contemplative and relational art for all people. Here the field, the tree, the stream is a temple to enter into and art something felt, fully experienced before artifact.

I will continue to be based more of the year in Asheville’s River Arts District, where I am presently relocating my studio after the flood and remain steadfastly committed to the rebuilding of my community and art village in Asheville that was almost entirely swallowed up by Hurricane Helene. All the while, I am holding this seed to the light of what’s possible in Ireland, listening to the call, and growing a support/eco system. This much I know: when you choose to purchase my Art exchanging energy from my warm hands to yours, you are participating in a bigger dream of Nead Fáinleoige and an eco contemplative bridge between Asheville and Ireland. It is my wish that 2025 will afford me a stronghold/daingean on this idea, and we’ll begin to put more form on it.