Mary Davis with ‘candidates’ from Assumption Secondary School in Walkinstown, Dublin this morning, including a pretendy ‘Mary Davis’ and a quite simply magnificent ‘Sean Gallagher’. Respect.

Via Mary Davis
Thanks Molly Fulton

I prefer to be silent while I work – too much chit-chat can be fatal – and instead like to listen to music. I always ask the sitter what they would like to hear, and was delighted when Colm Tóibín chose the Hungarian composer Kodály. However, I needn’t have worried that anything might distract Colm or I from the sitting, for Colm held this astonishing and unflinching pose for hours. He is a godsend to any artist!

After our meeting, Seamus Heaney sent me a copy of the book Stepping Stones, a collection of detailed interviews he gave Dennis O’Driscoll. In the inscription he writes that he admired the work I did when ‘faced with an older face’. The letter that accompanied this gift described his portrait as ‘frank and firmly decided’, and I do try to portray the sitter as I see them, and not ‘do an injury to them’ (a description Francis Bacon once applied to his work). In this portrait I drew on Seamus Heaney’s own words (from his 1995 Nobel prize address), and chose to portray his face beneath a series of stepping stones.

Of all the sitters I have drawn, the difference between the author’s character and the books they have written was never greater than with Josephine Hart. For this reason, I could only paint her as a double portrait, which I entitled ‘Dichotomy’. One shows Hart as one would meet her: calm, balanced, confident, happy, a mother, a grandmother, a successful bestselling author. The other is the inner woman as I imagine her: the beautiful Irish lady with wild hair, whose imagination has been shaped by a traumatic childhood, and who is therefore all too well acquainted with the cruel and dangerous side of life. In a letter written to me after she had seen the portrait, Josephine said that I had ‘revealed [her] to herself’.

 

Meh.

Face To Face With Writers – In Pictures by Zsuzsi Roboz (Guardian)

Yes, it’s Ireland.

But where?

Lines close at 12.30.

UPDATE: The image (by Peter Cox) was made at Poll an tSéideáin (Hole of the Blowing Spray) on the  west coast of Inis Meáin (Inishmaan), the middle of the three Aran Islands strung across the mouth of Galway Bay.

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