Blasket islanders may be remembered as writers, but they were also artists. A new book curated by artist Maria Simonds-Gooding which is due to be published next month, highlights the creative spirit of the late Blasket islander Mícheál Ó Gaoithín.
Life on the Great Blasket depicts gulls and puffins, lobsters, seals, men towing a cow behind a currach, goats in a churchyard, and his mother Peig Sayers are among images which Ó Gaoithín painted and which are reproduced in the book.
As The Sunday Times reports, 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.
Though he didn’t seem to take much heed of her gesture, he next greeted her with a celebration of his mother, “painted freely with luminous brushstrokes in bold yellow watercolour”.
He had captured Sayers sitting by the fire with a magnificent grey cat, its tail wrapped around a red footstool, staring out from the foreground.
“Though the painting is sparse, it is all the more rich and colourful in what it includes, “she writes in her introduction to a selection of his naive art, which is due to be published next month (November 2022) by Lilliput Press.
“Here was this lonely man, dreaming night and day of the life he had lived on the Blasket Islands, and now he was reliving those memories through a whole new visual medium with which he had never worked before,” she continues.
“It must have been a great discovery for him. We put a few more sods of turf on the fire to mark the start of an enduring and close friendship..”
An File Micheál Ó Gaoithín: The Blasket Painter”: Selected and Introduced by Maria Simonds-Gooding is published by Lilliput Press on November 3rd, and copies can be pre-ordered here
Its publication coincides with a special exhibition of Peig Sayers at the Museum of Literature Ireland.
The book is also being launched on November 19th at the Blasket Centre in Kerry as part of the Dingle Literary Festival, and there is a panel discussion with Maria Simonds-Gooding, Cristín Leach and Seamus Barra Ó Suilleabháin.
More details here
Read more in The Sunday Times here