THE YELLOW RIVER - Seán McSweeney & Gerard Smyth
The Yellow River is a tributary of the Blackwater (Kells), which joins the Boyne at Navan, County Meath that unites the personal histories of poet Gerard Smyth and artist Sean McSweeney. Gerard Smyth spent many summers in Meath staying with his grandmother and an aunt, whilst originally Sen McSweeney’s family lived in Clongill until the untimely death of his father. Over two years Gerard Smyth revisited Meath in further inquiry with Belinda Quirke, Director of Solstice, in the development of a new suite of poems, recollecting and revisiting significant sites of occurrence in the poet’s and county’s history. Sean McSweeney created new work from trips to his original home place and the county. McSweeney here responds lyrically to particular sites of Smyth’s poetry, whilst also depicting in watercolour, ink, tempera and drawing, the particular hues of The Royal County.
The Yellow River is a tributary of the Blackwater (Kells), which joins the Boyne at Navan, County Meath that unites the personal histories of poet Gerard Smyth and artist Sean McSweeney. Gerard Smyth spent many summers in Meath staying with his grandmother and an aunt, whilst originally Sen McSweeney’s family lived in Clongill until the untimely death of his father. Over two years Gerard Smyth revisited Meath in further inquiry with Belinda Quirke, Director of Solstice, in the development of a new suite of poems, recollecting and revisiting significant sites of occurrence in the poet’s and county’s history. Sean McSweeney created new work from trips to his original home place and the county. McSweeney here responds lyrically to particular sites of Smyth’s poetry, whilst also depicting in watercolour, ink, tempera and drawing, the particular hues of The Royal County.
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MEATH
Gerard Smyth
Although I was born and grew up in the heart of Dublin, in the city’s Liberties,
some of my most cherished memories are associated with a small farm in
County Meath. It was my mother’s birthplace, a thatched cottage just beyond
the village of Wilkinstown. More specifically, that ancestral homestead was
located in Knightstown, as my Meath grandmother insisted. I have always
heard a hint of Medieval romance in the place name and the place itself was
a definitive force in the forging of my imagination, perhaps providing a counter-identity
to the one that my Dublin streets gave me. At the very least I can
say – and have frequently said – I was twice-blessed.
And so it was to Knightstown thwat I returned summer after summer. The
place – that house with a roof of straw, the farmyard and its nooks, the pastures,
meadows, nearby woods and railway line – became my childhood idyll and
playground, and later the Arcadia of my adolescence where whatever sensitivities
to the natural world that I possess were first incubated. At least that is how
it all now seems, looking back to those harvest times of the 1950s and Sixties.
I still have the clearest ingrained memory of the sensation, the frisson, that
entered me every time I made my annual entry into the stony farmyard and
saw again the things that gave it its character: dungheap, milking shed, chicken
shit and chicken feed, henhouse, bikes against the whitewashed gable wall as
well as the relics “out of time”: an old cartwheel from the time of the horse,
the hanging harness seen through an open half-door and “the plough that my
grandfather walked behind…left where it settled and ripened into rust in the
garden rain.” The whole scene resonated a sense of timelessness.
Back then little did I know that an artist I would come to admire as one of our
finest landscape painters also had a close connection to the same locality. It is
hard for me to pinpoint exactly when I got to know Seán McSweeney and his
wife Sheila. I was familiar with his work and was greatly attracted to what I once
When the Day’s Work is Over
Watercolour on paper
20.5 x 14.5cm
2016
9
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