Land Marks IV, ©John O’Grady
10″ x 18″ x 0.75″, oil on canvas, ready to hang.
Not for Sale (NFS)
Seamus Heaney and T.P. Flanagan explored the Irish landscape together, Flanagan revealing hidden truths in paint and Heaney of course in words. The poet dedicated ‘Bogland’ to his friend.
In this poem, Heaney talks about how the land reveals its history to us by digging down. In so doing, we form a connection with that past.
it’s a beautiful and rich idea.
Whenever I make one of these bog or land mark paintings, texture always plays a large part in capturing the rich black butter-like texture of the turf.
Knife and rag are the tools of choice to apply across the canvas thick layers of burnt umber and burnt sienna.
When the paint has dried, I scratch and scrape back into the surface, a technique made popular during the Renaissance and that the Italians call ‘Scraffito’.
Scratching and digging away revealed the orange/bronze under painting and Seamus Heaney evocative words entered my head. First was his poem ‘Digging’ and then by natural extension, ‘Bogland’.
Some of his lines powered the emotional charge I felt while making this whisper-like painting including a whole jumble of interconnected things dredged from my past and revealed through the physical use of a brush and scraping tool.
Then, there are marks and traces we imprint on the land.
A man-made disused bank of turf set amongst grasses co-habits with nature’s markings on the distant mountain.
‘Bogland’ by Seamus Heaney:
We have no prairies
To slice a big sun at evening–
Everywhere the eye concedes to
Encrouching horizon,
Is wooed into the cyclops’ eye
Of a tarn. Our unfenced country
Is bog that keeps crusting
Between the sights of the sun.
They’ve taken the skeleton
Of the Great Irish Elk
Out of the peat, set it up
An astounding crate full of air.
Butter sunk under
More than a hundred years
Was recovered salty and white.
The ground itself is kind, black butter
Melting and opening underfoot,
Missing its last definition
By millions of years.
They’ll never dig coal here,
Only the waterlogged trunks
Of great firs, soft as pulp.
Our pioneers keep striking
Inwards and downwards,
Every layer they strip
Seems camped on before.
The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage.
The wet centre is bottomless.
I’d love to read what you think about the painting or these thoughts.
John, you have expressed the dawning of a new day beautifully through delicate, misty and ethereal colour and light in this lovely painting. It feels quiet and contemplative as if time stands still and yet, the land reveals it’s secrets of time passing through the watery channels engraved into the peaty earth , soft sighing grasses and distant well trod pathways. The foreground texture expresses and echoes the ancient cutting and scraping that you describe so well John; life ongoing, seasons changing, each new day in a ‘bog that keeps crusting’. Lovely.
Hello Chris,
I could see when I read your comment, that you clearly have experienced the wonderful fresh air of the bog and its special solitary atmosphere, as well of course its squelchy quality. Thank you for your poetic response to the painting, it’s gratifying to hear that the painting brought up those feelings.
Thank you for including “Bogland,” John — wonderful to read it again.
For me this painting evokes the duality, or more accurately a kind of dance, between not only land and air but also body and spirit, reason and imagination, even earth and heaven. The dark, wet bogland with its heavy peat, waving grasses, and pathways carved and meandering toward the horizon feel like life’s path, moving toward the distant and unknown, from the life of the flesh to something rarefied — or something we imagine to be so. The eye moves from the history-laden earth through the landscape toward the softly lit line of trees, mountains, and glorious pastel sky that could be more dream or wish than substantial. The passage through the corporeal into the ethereal is quite moving.
I wish I could experience such a landscape firsthand, but I feel you have given me a real sense of it.
Hello Jo,
It is a very special poem isn’t it?
Thank you for your thought provoking reading of the painting. When you mentioned ‘The passage through the corporeal into the ethereal’ it moved me what you had written. I hadn’t really thought about the painting from that perspective, it made me think about the link to the poem and the land and the passage through the grasses as you mentioned, ‘ like life’s path moving toward the distant and unknown’.
mmm…. looks and sounds delicious .. oh how lucky you are to have embraced the scene and captured so well , I would love a little piece of it. I love it John
Thank you very much Elles 🙂