Award-winning Irish and international artist Maria Simonds-Gooding has a unique relationship with the Kerry coastline, where she lives, and she introduced the Blasket island of Inis Mhic Oileáin to its late owners, Charles J Haughey.
Life on the Great Blasket, with depictions of gulls and puffins, lobsters, seals, and men towing a cow behind a currach, are among images which late islander Micheál Ó Gaoithín painted, due to Simonds-Gooding’s encouragement.
As Afloat reported previously, that was back in the early 1970s, and Simonds-Gooding has now ensured that his work is reproduced in a book published by Lilliput Press.
An Blascaod Mór an tan a bhí sé i réim | The Great Blasket in its prime | coloured pencils, blue biro and graphite | 25.4 cm x 34.8 cm. Artwork by Mícheál Ó Gaoithín. Courtesy Maria Simonds-Gooding
Simonds-Gooding first met Ó Gaoithín 54 years ago, when he was living on the Kerry mainland and was known locally as “An File” for his poetry, storytelling and translation work.
Simonds-Gooding introduced him to painting, after she left paper, paints and brushes on his kitchen table.
“If I had taught him how to paint, I wouldn’t want anything better,”she recalls of one of his first pieces, an image of his late mother, Peig Sayers.
Mícheál Ó Gaoithín's drawing of his mother: Peig spinning Courtesy Maria Simonds-Gooding
Simonds-Goodings speaks to Wavelengths about the book in the first of a series of occasional interviews on Kerry coastal life.
An File Micheál Ó Gaoithín: The Blasket Painter” : Selected and Introduced by Maria Simonds-Gooding has been nominated as an Irish Times book of the year.
Book cover for An File (The Poet), Mícheál Ó Gaoithín, The Blasket Painter edited by Maria Simonds-Gooding. Sochraid ar an Oileán | An Island funeral | watercolour | 20.2 cm x 27.5 cm. Artwork by Mícheál Ó Gaoithín. Courtesy Maria Simonds-Gooding
Available in all good bookshops, and here
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