Description
Jacinta is painting under trees, capturing every note of the birds’ songon a canvas that is netting the spring air. From here, she is a child or a 1950s mother hauling out a quilt to dry on the clothes line, something deemed unseemly now for gardens. My mother saw a full line of bright white nappies flapping in the wind, the pristine fruit of her morning. Jacinta hangs her work from the trees on Easter branches, buds ready to burst, daffodils smears of yellow in the grass, a black bird scuffling among the dead leaves of the beech hedge. Jacinta leaves the painting out on the grass overnight and tends it with a blue bucket in the morning. Is she adding to it or plucking off what it has snared? The stray feathers of a crow or a bee that has trespassed in the paint? Perhaps the course hair of a puzzled creature that sniffed it and this minute carries off the colour to its lair? When this painting hangs, will it hold the outside in? Does it know it is an plain air? I have never seen a painter work like this and envy her the chance to play which is surely what art is.
PUBLIC COLLECTIONS
Contemporary Music Society Temple Bar, Dublin. | National Chamber Choir, National Concert Hall, Dublin. | Music Network, National Concert Hall, Dublin. | Tallaght Hospital, Dublin. | St John of God Hospital, Stillorgan, Dublin. | Our Lady’s Hospice and Care Services, Harold’s Cross, Dublin. | Blackrock Hospice, Dublin. | The Quaker Nursing Home, Rathfarnham, Dublin. | Jack and Jill Foundation Head Office, Kildare. | HSE Sallins, Kildare.