AND HERE COMES MAGIC AGAIN—A place of magic cocooned in one of the most beautiful spots on the Kerry side of Beara.
Alongside the road to Eyeries from Allihies, atop a rise above pastures and bosky hedgerows overlooking Coulagh Bay, sits what looks at first like a small neat bungalow. The grounds, sprawling languorously behind high bushes, are meticulously manicured. Velvety lawns are edged with profusions of flowers. There’s a fountain and a duck pond, and it all seems a little decadently suburban. But then if you wander as I did on my first visit to the rear of the house, you’ll find the land suddenly tumbling away down steep rocky clefts crammed with Tolkienesque tangles of hawthorn and stunted, twisted trees. Cascades and waterfalls have cut deep into the strata. Narrow paths weave their way through a permanent twilight of shadowy niches pierced by sudden laser-thin sun rays. The water chitters and chuckles, invisible birds chirp and twitter, and there are odd rustlings in the undergrowth. If you follow the path far enough you’ll end up on one of the bay beaches.
The abrupt contrast between the neat roadside garden at the front of the house, and the primeval spirit of the tumbled land behind, is of course absolutely intentional.
In fact everything is intentional here at Anam Cara, a place recognized as one of the finest retreats for artists, writers, and poets in the whole of Ireland. And it has been a focal point of Beara’s creative energies since 1998, when it was founded by one of the most altruistic and energetic “catalysts of change” on the peninsula. Her name is Susan Booth-Forbes and, following an extensive career as writer, editor, and communication director in Boston and “a significant change in marital status” (a divorce), she decided to follow her longtime dream to move to Ireland and create an environment where artists and writers could come together and “celebrate their muses.” And Sue is one of those lucky individuals who not only listens and responds to dream-directed urges but also knows how to turn them into inspiring realities.
Anam Cara translates from Gaelic as “Soul Friend,” and she dedicated her new “base” to John O’Donoghue, whose book on Celtic wisdom of the same name had long offered nurturing visions to Sue.
In her invitational Web site, she offers “an intimate residential retreat providing time, space, and creature comforts to support your focusing on your own projects and doing your best creative work.” Susan goes on to describe herself as “part friend, part editor, part travel guide, and part mid-wife in stimulating creative rebirths and helping participants to slow down enough inside to maximize their individual capabilities.” From what we’d heard locally, she’d helped many writers rediscover their muses and cease their languishing in unpublished purgatory.
When I first visited she greeted me with such mercurial warmth that I wondered if we’d known each other as friends in some past incarnation. And, as if to immediately confirm that odd sensation, she said, “You look familiar. I feel I’ve met you somewhere before.” I mumbled some inane reply about “wishing we had” as I was being led on a guided interior tour of the retreat.
What seemed a modest bungalow-styled structure from the road morphed into an intriguing array of spaces. Some were small and intimate niches ideal for sharing the challenges and joys of the creative process. Others included a delightful sunroom complete with grape arbor, a charming dining area and kitchen for her ten or so “guests,” a series of large central spaces that, on her popular “community evenings,” can host up to a hundred or more visitors for lectures, poetry readings (Leanne O’Sullivan, one of our favorite “creators” on Beara, had a star billing here in 2006), artist shows, and workshops—and even the occasional hullabaloo of a music, singing, and dancing hooley.
In addition to ensuring “lots of quiet creative time” for her guests, Sue also organizes an array of writing workshops and art sessions, field trips to nearby Eyeries and other key places around Beara, Celtic-flavored events, and yoga periods. “And to cap it all—I do fabulous breakfasts of omelets and homemade soda bread as top attractions!”
As she gave examples of literary and artistic “breakthrough moments” for which Anam Cara is apparently renowned, she projected a fascinating dual persona of enthusiasm wrapped in a cooler, gimlet-eyed, guru-tinged organizer-self. One of her recent “creative coups” was a workshop conducted by the Irish-American poet Billy Collins, once the poet laureate of the USA. Admirers of his power-packed works have described them as “full of quirky bends and heart-stopping imagery” and “like a plate of fat pancakes—lots of good stuff that will stick to your ribs for a long time.”
Apparently the workshop was a roaring success, with Billy in fine fettle offering “no mollycoddling,” criticizing the overuse of the thesaurus in certain works in progress, and “treating us like real poets,” according to one participant, who also described him as “a Peter Pan high on Ireland—and a fantastic dancer, inside the house, outside and, on one occasion, in the duck pond!”
“Listen,” said Sue as we sat sipping afternoon tea in the sunroom. “Maybe you’d like to join us next week. We’re having a couple of Beara artists bring their works in and give us a talk. They’re both well known here and on show at local galleries on the peninsula. It should be fun.”
“Most of the artists I know seem to hate describing their work habits and paintings,” I suggested, “except in the most esoteric of terms, which is usually not much fun at all!”
“Trust me. You’ll love these two…”
And so I came and I did.
JOHN BRENNAN WAS A bald, bright-eyed, young-looking man who seemed to relish the uncertainty of the “creative process.” A half-hour PowerPoint presentation of his artworks seemed to enthrall the hundred or so locals in the audience. He stirred up chuckles and giggles with his references to “hours spent just looking at a painting and wondering where to go next” and “I always try to keep a number of canvases going simultaneously so I don’t get bored.” He emphasized that he was talking about paintings, not people, although he admitted he had a “low threshold for tolerance of sameness.” And yet—superficially at least—there seemed to be a great deal of “sameness” about his colored boxes paintings. He suggested his variations were subtle and “not always immediately apparent” and the audience seemed to agree. However, the notes he used to describe his explorations of his abstract genre helped clarify the process:
What and how to paint? Imagery. Inventing a vocabulary for a wordless world. The process of designing and then selecting the most appropriate image to convey a given word, an adjective…There are no words, no representational imagery to guide us toward a possible meaning…Do these shapes have a certain resonance for us and does this affect how we react…Would an irregular shape be more potent and also open to wider interpretation…Is it really possible to communicate “a specific feeling” or “an experience” by such simple or abstract means…Unlike a writer, I do not have a plot or outline to begin, only a starting point…Thus begins a journey of discovery, elimination, and of decision-making…My shapes are my characters…I cajole and mold them and the shapes evolve in color and form…I’m always altering the direction the painting could take and maybe taking the road less traveled…until I am left in no doubt that the shapes I select work collectively within the confines of the canvas…I’m always working towards the unknown.
What could have been a load of effetist mumbo jumbo and aesthetic gobbledygook became instead a courageous revelation of one artist’s tenuous search for meaning and significance in totally abstract terms using nothing but color, simple random shapes, and the critical spaces in between. Most artists prefer not to (or maybe just can’t) explain their own creative mazes. Maybe, in many instances, there’s not that much to explain anyway. In a lot of contemporary art, one senses an arrogant dismissive “you either get it or you don’t” or “whatever it means to you is what it means” attitude on the part of so-called artists. But John, who had a permanent exhibition of his work at the Mill Cove Gallery just east of Castletownbere, was open, honest, and obviously beguiled by the vagaries and vastness of the abstract “creative process.”
Admittedly, his audience seemed more beguiled as he showed how sometimes his abstracts morphed almost unintentionally into semirepresentational works, most notably dramatic seascapes of churning, writhing waves with maybe just a hint of land at the far edges of the canvas.
“You can tell how living here on Beara can create this kind of response,” he said, smiling. “You’re surrounded by the ocean. Its sound, its fury, its ever-changing moods and its dominant power…They all get inside and eventually emerge in my paintings, sometimes when I least expect it…In my sea paintings I’m trying to combine a certain balance of realism and abstraction. I’m also looking for a sense of timelessness in the colors and forms. I don’t want it to be a particular time of day. I want it to be…eternal…transcendent beyond just sea paintings into something else…something more enduring…intriguing…fascinating.”
And it was indeed fascinating to share John’s fascination. He seemed, like many fine artists, to be blending the dual capacities of standing deeply within his own mind and artistry and yet far outside the source of the stimulation—seeing it objectively almost as the Creator Him/Herself might see it. And trying to express, in James Joyce’s words, “the particular in the universal” (and vice versa).
The second artist of the evening, Jeannie Richardson, was an intriguing study in contrasts. She was frail, shy, and soft-spoken and seemed to have great difficulty with the PowerPoint system. For a moment she looked so flummoxed and uncomfortable that I thought she’d hastily apologize and flee from the stage. But she didn’t. And the audience applauded her spontaneously just for staying put. And I for one was delighted that she had, because her life and art were so beguilingly different from John Brennan’s. She made no references to “juxtaposed abstracts,” “nonrepresentational imagery,” “spatial illusions,” and “unresolved states.” Instead she merely showed a sequence of her highly realistic work of animals, plants, and vegetables, and Vermeer-like still-life watercolors. And while it looked as if she might be tantalizingly close at times to producing Hallmark-type illustrations, she always seemed to manipulate composition, color, and moods of great calm in such a subtle way that you sensed layerings of perceptions and meanings in even the simplest of her subjects.
Sculpture at Mill Cove Gallery
Someone in the audience tried to express that feeling, but while Jeannie was obviously moved, she dismissed the remarks with a blush and an “oh no…I just paint what I put in front of me.”
It would indeed be refreshing to hear such modesty from “artists” with far less talent and clarity of vision. But I guess “the less talent you possess, the more you’ve got to hawk the runty-bit of it around,” as a cynical editor-friend of mine once remarked when yet one more hacked-out, Harlequin-type horror-romance, as he called them, hit the top of the fiction best-seller lists in the New York Times.
And Sue Booth-Forbes knows plenty about best-seller lists from her experiences “in another life,” with writing, writers, editing, and publishers. We hope her intimate “Soul Friend” nexus here on the peninsula continues to nurture needy creative spirits and forces for years to come. In many ways this is a key to Beara’s future and its power as a muse-releasing, spirit-nurturing, soul-healing focal point. It’s either that or the dreaded Ring of Kerry–type road-widening threats and bumper-to-bumper tour buses.
And for most who live here, from long-lineage families to blissful blow-ins, that’s not even an option.