Name: Una Sealy. Address: Howth, Co Dublin Dwelling: Fisherman's Cottage. Here since: 2000
I grew up in Howth, but left when I went to college, and didn't live in Howth again for 20 years. We were living in San Francisco in later years, and when we were moving back to Dublin, I never thought we would live in Howth. We ended up renting a flat in Howth, near my parents, and stayed.
A lot of people say Howth has some of the atmosphere of San Francisco and the Bay area. There seems to be an affinity between the two.
I paint urban situations, and even though Howth is still a village, there's a feeling of urban stimulation here that I use for my work. The northside suburbs are so familiar. They are in my blood. The roofs, streets and gardens of Howth, as well as the well-travelled route into town, with its 1930s shelters and bandstands, and the bathing huts on the Bull Wall all provide inspiration. I engage with all this, plus the people who inhabit the area, by recording everything in paint. It's a way of holding on to the moment.
I paint from life, on location somewhere, and then develop paintings and work them up and finish them in the studio. That's where I would gather the work, appraise it, see what needs to be done, in peace and quiet. The bones would be done on location.
I originally had a studio in the house, but we got to the stage where we needed the extra room in the house for children's bedrooms, so we put a studio at the end of the garden two years ago. We have a long, thin garden, so it was ideal to put something at the end of it.
It's a Shomera studio. It has worked out really well because it's so well insulated, while the house, which is an old fisherman's cottage, has rattling, drafty sash windows, and is freezing cold in winter. The studio is a really nice place to go to because it's warm and has double glazing. It's really quite luxurious, if a little messy.
There are two rooms in the studio. One room is where I keep all my books and records of my works and photographs - a kind of clean room. The larger space is for painting only and that's got paint everywhere, so I don't have to worry about walls or floors or anything like that. I visited the Francis Bacon studio just last week and actually thought it looked quite tidy compared to mine.
I have an exhibition opening next week in the Molesworth Gallery on Molesworth Street, so I've been quite busy.
In conversation with Davin O'Dwyer