I’ve left my reclusive hideaway in the midlands but I still have several landscape-themed paintings, like the one above, that need more work. It remains to be seen whether I’ll ever finish them. It’s surprisingly difficult to change location and keep momentum. 

I’m also sick at the moment and have not the slightest interest in painting anything at all. I’m on lots of medication which is dulling my senses and limiting my movements, and even the keenest artist’s eye might not find much inspiration in charting the colours of the phlegm spectrum. 

Work in progress, oil on canvas, 30×24.5". 

When I was a kid, to be called a “bogman” was an insult. It meant you were stupid, uncultured, uncivilised. Never mind that many of Ireland’s greatest poets and painters were inspired by bogland, by its history, its beauty and its mysteries. I’d never really seen the attraction myself, not having grown up near it and catching only glimpses of flat, dark earth on long car journeys. If it wasn’t boring it was mildly menacing, with stories of lost souls drowned in bogholes, led astray by a will-o’-the-wisp, or human sacrifices buried in the bog by druids or republicans. 

So I went to the bog to see what I was missing. And it really is beautiful. It was lonely and windswept, but warm and soft underfoot, with an incredible variety of bizarre, alien plant-life. Pieces of a fallen branch eroded by acid looked like twists of fabric, feathered and fraying. I almost lost my foot a couple of times to treacherous ground, pitch black water gliding into deep footprints. I half hoped to find a body. What I did find was a thin tree, creaking in annoyance as a wooden pallet left leaning against its trunk gradually wore away the bark. I pulled the pallet down, I saved the tree. I half expected someone to grant me wishes. 

A work in progress – oil & oil pastel on canvas, 30×24". 

This is a small waterfall I discovered amidst the woods in the Slieve Bloom mountains, in Co. Offaly. I don’t know how successful my efforts at landscape are. I think a painting should say more than “here’s this thing I saw.” But I don’t know if these do. I’m finding it hard to articulate what it feels like to be here, alive in the world, and looking at Stuff. It feels good.