Patricia’s Blog
Interesting collaborative arts project following in the footsteps of Paul Henry in Achill and Connemara. Welcome.
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Achill Island 1912: A Microcosm of Swirling Political Movements.
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They say it is now ‘the largest off-road walking and cycling trail in Ireland’. The 42km Great Western Greenway stretching from Westport through Newport and Mulranny to Achill Island is proving to be a wonderful draw for walkers and cyclists alike. The trail follows the path of the disused line of the Midland Great Western…
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You can walk in the footsteps of the artist Paul Henry, following the shoreline from Dooagh to Keel, as part of the May bank-holiday Achill Walks Festival. There are a half-dozen walks, some on the island, some on the north-west Mayo mainland in Ballycroy National Park and the Nephin mountain range. A century ago Paul…
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I was back In Achill recently when the wind roared and the Atlantic churned and the mist hid the outlines of Slievemore. I did a quick car tour of some literary haunts. Between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries writers and visual artists flocked to Achill, helped by the extension of the railway line to the…
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I made it on the very last day. The Moderns – the major exhibition of the Arts in Ireland in the 20th century at Dublin’s Irish Museum of Modern Arts (IMMA). It covered modernity in Ireland from the 1900s to the 1970s through the visual arts mainly, but with photographers, film-makers, composers, architects, designers –…
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Jo Slade’s biography poem The Artist’s Room traces the artist Gwen John (1876-1939) through Paris at the start of the twentieth-century: ‘I looked for her in Paris…/ walked from place to place, lived the smells, the sounds, / followed a plan I’d drawn.’ A painter-poet, Jo Slade uses her artist’s eye to distill the essence of Gwen John’s…
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