Barry Castle: The painter Barry Castle, who died last week, was known for her vivid allegorical fantasies, featuring animal and human characters in stylised, often bucolic settings. Her intricately detailed work was distinguished by a note of mischievous humour but it was also thoughtful and introspective in tone. It sometimes featured self-portraits, disguised to a greater or lesser extent.
The graphic clarity and translucent colouring of her technique were ideally suited to illustration and she illustrated several books, including one, Cooking for Cats (1985), for which she herself provided the verse text. Her writing displays a mordant wit and an instinct for the macabre reminiscent of Roald Dahl.
Castle was born in 1935. Her mother was the novelist, dramatist and cookery writer Maura Laverty and her father, James Laverty, was a journalist with The Irish Times. A shy child, she progressed restlessly through a succession of schools, including the Holy Faith Convent on Haddington Road ("a gloomy place", she later recalled), St Louis in Rathmines and, she related, an establishment run by a Dr Teller where for two years she kept her coat on in class because no one told her where to hang it up.
She was more settled in Loreto Abbey, where she boarded until the age of 15, when she was dispatched to the National College of Art and Design. As a student there, she "wasn't particularly good", she said modestly, but she became firm friends with several contemporaries, including Pauline Bewick and Tom Ryan PPRHA. She left after only two years and it was some time before she lifted a paint brush again.
While at the NCAD she met Philip Castle, who was studying physics at Trinity with Nobel Laureate Ernest Walton. Philip forsook his studies to become a self-taught painter of hugely detailed, architectonic compositions, and they married in 1963.
In the mid-1960s they settled in Villefranche-sur-Mer in the south of France. They subsequently acquired a ruined farmhouse in a remote part of Tuscany. Eventually managing to make a scorpion-infested section of the house habitable (formerly the pigsty, Castle maintained), they spent two months there each summer. Finding herself alone in their French home when Philip was away for a month in 1968, Castle started to paint with his brushes.
From that point on she painted consistently, though it took her some time to find her own style. Philip exhibited his work with the Portal Gallery in London and, from 1974, she showed her paintings there too. While the Portal specialised in Outsider art, she was not an Outsider artist as such. Although she described herself as a naive artist, her technique was sophisticated and displayed know-ledge of medieval and renaissance art. She also exhibited in the Solomon Gallery, Dublin.
When in Dublin she and Philip resided in a tiny building in Proud's Lane, managing to fit surprisingly large numbers of people into a minimal space for lavish dinner parties. Like her mother, she was a brilliant cook.
Reading through her mother's papers, she was inspired to illustrate some of her writings and two books ensued: The Cottage in the Bog, (1992) and The Queen of Aran's Daughter (1995), the first a story of Irish rural life, the second a collection of fairy tales set on Aran.
A retrospective exhibition of her work was held at the Royal Hibernian Academy Gallagher Gallery in 1998. She nursed Philip for a long period before his death last year.
Barry Castle: born May 29th, 1935; died August 16th, 2006.