Rosita Boland hears from artists who have settled in Co Sligo about the things that drew them westward: prices, privacy and panoramas.
These days, for artists, the west of Ireland - and Sligo particularly - is the place to be. In the past decade, an increasing number of creative artists have moved to Co Sligo. Among the writers now based there are novelists Pat McCabe, Eoin McNamee and Leland Bardwell, and poet Dermot Healy. Among the painters are Seán MacSweeney, who has possibly most made the county his own, with his luminous, striking seascapes and bog-pool paintings. Other painters in Sligo include Sinéad Aldridge, Pat Hall, Nick Miller, Ronnie Hughes, Barrie Cooke and Diarmuid Delargy.
So what brings these artists here in particular? After all, the sky is as wide, and the landscape as big and promising in other counties ...
RONNIE HUGHES is originally from Belfast. He lives now in Skreen: a road that meanders across the top of Sligo. His studio, which has a wall of windows, overlooks a vast horizon that encompasses the Atlantic, Ben Bulben and Knocknaree. His wife, Eva Byrne, and their children Ben (4), Sophie (2), and Jasmine (10 months) have lived here for four years and in Sligo itself for nine years. Why Sligo?
"Because it was cheap," he says pragmatically. "It's less so now, but if you're a painter, you need space, and it's almost impossible to find that now in Dublin. I guess we could have moved to the midlands, which were also cheap, but Sligo has such wonderful landscape - and a lot of galleries."
The catalyst for their decision to settle here came when they were temporarily based in Sligo town while Hughes was doing some teaching. While they were swimming at Streedagh Strand one day, a salmon leaped over their heads. "It was amazing - magical, in fact," Hughes recalls.
Living in Sligo has caused "a very profound change" in his work. He used to focus on political issues, but the move prompted a change in direction, and he began to work in the abstract form. He also switched from oils to acrylics. "The work I used to do didn't feel right in Sligo," he explains, describing what he does now as "lyrical". The abstract canvases in the studio at present, of vibrant intertwining lines, have their origin "in the brambles and hedgerows; the way their branches interlock. I wanted to get that kind of vitality and sense of energy."
DESPITE TWO sets of directions, I still get lost en route to Barrie Cooke's house, in the townland of Ballinlig, overlooking Lough Arrow. You know you're further from the sea here, and the landscape feels more enclosed, despite the big, messy, moody sky. It's stark and wild out here; a place where the wind blows loud and insistent. Eventually, I know I'm looking down the right boreen when I see the purpose-built studio, adjacent to the house - which looks like an afterthought in the enormous shadow of the studio.
Even without the studio, you have only to look at the weather vane to know this is the house of someone a bit different. Instead of the standard "N, S, E, W," the points are composed of the words Far East, True North, Wild West, and Deep South. The weather vane is the work of Cooke's friend, English sculptor Bill Woodrow, who made it as a gift for Cooke when he moved in. Cooke was born in Cheshire, but has been based in Ireland since 1954, and in Sligo for the past 12 years.
The windows in Cooke's huge, barn-like space are a type of opaque perspex. They're north-facing, to capture the still, untroubled light that painters seek in a workplace. He says he loves the light here. Unlike Ronnie Hughes's studio, there's no view, since you can't see through the windows, and anyway, they face away from the lake. Does he not miss the view?
"I don't want a view at all when I'm working," Cooke says, looking astounded, and slightly horrified at the idea. He taps his head. "My view is all in here. I don't want people to see it."
Cooke's studio is magnificently messy: an extensive jumble of canvases, paints, papers, fishing rods and reels, part of a boat, photographs, easels and brushes. There are various quotes written in pencil on the wall. One reads: "when the snow melts you see the dogshit." Cooke has some 20 vivid, striking paintings of writers that he hasn't yet exhibited: Seamus Heaney, John McGahern, Mary O'Malley, Dermot Healy, Ted Hughes, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. He pulls the portraits out one by one, and talks of hoping to exhibit them together at some point in the future, when he feels the collection is finished. Other works in progress include a series of landscapes based on his time in New Zealand and Cape Cod.
Inside, at the house, the conservatory is full of bright geraniums. On the big wooden table in the centre of the room are spread Cooke's letters from his close friend, the late Ted Hughes, the poet. An edition of Hughes's letters are currently in preparation, and Cooke has been asked to lend some of his correspondence. When Cooke disappears into the kitchen to make coffee, I stare warily across the room toward the table on which Ted Hughes's letters are lying face-up, with their pile of envelopes beside them, and wonder how many academics would love to be in this room right now.
Hughes, like Cooke, was also a devoted fisherman and a lover of remote places throughout his life. He often stayed here. You suspect that the view was possibly more useful to him while roaming round outside, working out lines in his head, than it is to Cooke the painter in his studio. The two artists collaborated on a project in 1982, The Great Irish Pike, a set of six lithographs by Cooke with the holograph of the poem by Hughes.
Cooke returns with the coffee and says that an American university has been in consistent contact, trying to buy Hughes's letters for their archive, but he is having none of it. "The letters are for my children," Cooke says, briskly and decisively. Later, looking out over the lake where they both went fishing, he says how much he misses his late friend.
NICK MILLER, originally from London, lives virtually next door to Cooke in country terms: just a couple of miles down the road, in the townland of Kilmactranny. He has been in Sligo since 1993, and lives here with his wife Noreen and sons Reuben (8) and Aaron (6). They originally came to Sligo from Dublin for a summer, renting a house in Tubbercurry. In typical Irish fashion, where everyone knows everyone else, he was first introduced to this part of Sligo by Cooke, who offered him the loan of his studio when he was abroad.
Miller liked the area so much that he and his wife went looking for their own house. He also liked Cooke's studio so much that he "cloned it", by building an identical one beside his pretty Victorian house. It's not his only studio, though. His other one is in a converted truck. This brilliantly simple concept means that the landscape comes to Miller, who drives round Sligo, opens the doors at the back of the truck and then paints his intricate, densely-textured landscapes from the covered shelter of his mobile studio. He's currently finishing work on a show called Genre, for Kilkenny's Butler Gallery, which opens today.
Like Hughes, Miller was also partly attracted to Sligo because it was cheaper than Dublin. "Artists tend to follow studio space. And there's a privacy about the place that suits artists," he suggests. "It's nice to know there are other artists in the county, but you really have to be in the north-west for yourself. It's too hard a place to live in for no reason: you have to be self-sufficient here."
The Sligo landscape has seeped into all his work. "As soon as I moved out of Dublin, my levels of concentration changed. Sligo is a wet, tough environment. I'm completely engrossed in the density of the landscape. I paint the rain all the time. And I like making art in places where it doesn't matter. A painter doesn't matter in the countryside in the way a farmer does, for instance. That gives you great freedom."
Miller describes himself as being "completely absorbed in thelandscape for the past 10 years". It's true. He doesn't just paint the landscape for a living, the landscape also feeds the family. Later, he shows me his quite wonderful vegetable garden full of corn, tomatoes, leeks, squash, courgettes, beans, chard, peas, fennel, tomatoes, and masses of herbs.
He might not see his fellow Sligo artists too often, but Miller says he really enjoys the times they do meet. "You have to fill up at the petrol pump of the brain every now and then," he says, grinning. Happily, that's one tank that oil prices will never affect.
Nick Miller's exhibition, Genre, begins today in the Butler Gallery, Kilkenny. Ronnie Hughes is currently participating in a group show at the Graphic Studio, Temple Bar, Dublin