The Artist At Work
Vera lives with her husband Francis and their four children and their dog Shorty in Boyle, Co. Roscommon. Up to now she has mainly exhibited in the West of Ireland. The show at the RDS on May 15th is her first Dublin and national exhibition.
For the past 9 years she has been inspired by the ancient boglands of North Roscommon and she brings forth their mystic magic in a profusion of colour with powerful confident brushstrokes that touch the imagination and the soul.
From the beginning people were taken by her work - at her very first exhibition, Iontas, in 1999, Irish Times critic Aidan Dunne singled it out.
Later, everything she exhibited at the Cat and Moon gallery in Sligo sold out before the opening. The director of the Boyle Arts festival, Fergus Ahern regularly exhibits her work at the prestigious Boyle Arts Festival show. On foot of all this, collectors, galleries, agents, festivals and dealers now beat a path to her door.
She is self taught and she joins that elite group of artists who have an impressive body of work behind them as well as successful selling out exhibitions, and who are expected to continue to produce excellent work in a commercial market. And while she continues to paint in the Curlew Mountains, beside the dark bog pools and near the lakes where the ancient crannogs are her constant inspiration, she knows there is now a national and international market intent on making demands on her.
Inspiration for her work comes from the bogs that lie across the top of the Curlew mountains- Limnagh, Ballinameen, Cornameelta, Breedogue, Canada, , Knockroe. She can see the Curlew Mountains from her kitchen window. “I get so excited when I see the wild bogland spaces, and even though they seem to be brown or black, and I could paint them as such, what comes out is a heightened sense of moment and emotion and colour. The crannogs, appear to me to sit like jewels on the lake” She says that “the lakes in Boyle area are dotted with crannogs”
With four children, she has never had the luxury of the famous male painters (and indeed many of the female ones) who could retreat to far off studios where no interruptions entered. Instead, she has pitched her studio in the heart of the house near the kitchen.
She worked with FBD insurance for 17 years before moving to live in Boyle and whether it is her training or innate sense of structure, she is meticulous, busy and organised. There is perfection, and beauty even in the ordered rows of the contents of her kitchen cupboards. And her painting follows the same ordered process.
Despite the myriad of colours that burst from her canvases, she uses just four tubes of paint: alizarin crimson, Prussian blue, cadmium yellow and titanium white. “The magic is in the mix”, she says. She doesn’t just use any old paints but the best Michael Harding paints renowned for holding their colour and she brings them in from London via Milliken Brothers of Greyabbey near Newtonards who also make the linen canvases, which she favours. (She points out what happened to Rothko whose work she admires when his colours began to fade). Her framer is local man Michael Ewing from Knockvicar in county Roscommon who was a bit of a Svengali to her when she first started out and who has artists coming from all over Europe to have their work framed by him.
She’s not sure where her first impulse to paint came from but she doesn’t necessarily think it came from a visitor who gave her a box of oil paints when she was a child. “I was disgusted she didn’t show me how to use them and never touched oils until much later on. I was always drawing at school”.
When she is not painting, you may see her at impromptu music sessions at Wynnes pub in Boyle or a couple of miles out at Dickie Beirne’s pub in a place called Easter Snow. You may even hear her singing sean –nos and other traditional songs. Her favourites are The Mountains of Pommeroy and Donal Og - a song that the late poet Ted Hughes said was the greatest love poem ever written.
Traditional music of the North Connaught region and in particular the playing of fiddler and friend, John Carty is an important inspiration in her work. His compositions and dramatic arrangements have a significant resonance with her. She often paints listening to this music recreating the same wildness of territory on canvas.
The background music throughout her exhibition will be that of fiddler John Carty. Boyle town and the hinterland of Co Roscommon provide a haven for artists, actors and musicians. It’s a favourite area, too, for President Mary MacAleese whose rooftop can be seen from Lough Key.
And while Vera Gaffney, because of her work, may be in danger of becoming a tourist attraction herself, she is more concerned with preserving the mystic folklore of Ireland’s ancient bogland and of the crannogs, which are a source of wonder to her. The crannog, a type of habitation built on an island on a lake has its earliest examples dating from the early Bronze Age.
She is aware of their ancient history and indeed, if you look carefully you can see such subtle images as primitive, tribal warriors marching among their reeds. You will also see flower stems that bear the shapes of musical notes, and moonscapes with an oriental touch. In the crannog series, the depths of the foliage seem to be teeming with life, with human shapes interacting, and often bearing shields and spears.
You will also catch the rhythm of music. Music is the power that drives her art. She is continually listening to it as she paints: reeds stretch gracefully upwards, flower petals burst forth into colour, and bog cotton sways as if in time to some hidden, urgent beat.
She calls her exhibition Fágaim Laistiar , ( “I Leave Behind”). She hopes her painting will perpetuate part of our lost heritage, our ancient landscape. If what she leaves behind continues to be of the calibre of her exhibition pieces for the RDS, she can rest assured that our ancient landscape is alive and well in a profusion of exuberant and often exotic colours.
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