Deep study unearths a new Irish landscape

Ireland. The Emerald Isle. Green. Bucolic. Shrouded in mist, rain and clouds.

Cyril O'Flaherty obliterates this image with bold lines almost carved into canvas, deep shadows, cottages and light houses cast as dominating geometric shapes and acutely angled light that sets the Irish landscape aglow, if not afire.

O'Flaherty, along with fellow painter Lol Hardiman and photographer Nick Hitchcox provide their own takes on Irish landscape from the island of Achill Beag, now largely abandoned, in a show at the Celtic Corners Gallery, 196 Cabot St.

The show comes to Beverly after opening at Boston College.

The trio made seasonal visits to the island throughout 2006, staying anywhere from a week to 10 days in complete solitude, each visiting independently and making their sketches, studies and photos of the island.

For O'Flaherty, light's interaction with building, landscape, cloud and open sky formed the foundation for the radical interpretation underpinning his paintings.

The artists took the idea of studying the island at length from Gerald Dillon who, in the 1960s, painted on the islands and lived among the islanders. Now, all the year-round residents are gone. The Irish government first began moving people off the remote islands in the late 1960s because it was too expensive to support them, O'Flaherty said. The government continued the repatriation for the next 20 years.

Now, islands like Achill Beag, part of the Aran Islands, 30 miles west of Galway, off Ireland's west coast, are all but abandoned. A few summer residents return to claim a few cottages, but the year-round communities no longer exist. Nature has already begun to reclaim roads, walls and the abandoned cottages.

So part of the goal was to capture the island's essence artistically, and part was to record the remnants of local cultures that disappeared.

"We wanted to explore the nature of the islands now," said O'Flaherty. "It's an artist's job to keep finding what's new."

Part of discovering what was new in the islands was absorbing what was old about them - living with the remnants of villages once filled with farmers, fishermen and merchants, of homes once filled with families. The idea of living on the islands, essentially camping, alone, for days at a time was to experience the islands fully.

O'Flaherty and his compatriots wanted to know what they looked like in summer light close to midnight. To know what they looked, smelled and felt like after an autumn afternoon squall moved through. To know when and where the elements would be just right for the light to stream across a newly wet dale, illuminating the grass in multi-colored tufts infused with red, gold and green, highlighting a white schoolhouse, surrounded by a stone fence, with the roiling sea beyond and the sun just catching the storm clouds turning the black almost purple as they race off.

As O'Flaherty puts it, "You can't just expect a painting to yield itself."

Paintings take study, sometimes a quick sketch capturing a moment or a photograph. Sometimes starting at dawn waiting, waiting for that split second when the clouds break, the sun streams and the island opens.

In stark, bold, black lines, O'Flaherty captures a sense of desolation and spirit simultaneously in such times. The lines so deep and scarring the paintings have the quality of woodcuts. But then the colors kick in. Bright on first pass and delicate in their multi-colored layers on further inspection.

Beyond the moment. Beyond the beauty, the celebration and aching isolation in these island paintings, O'Flaherty hopes the works go deeper, preserving the legacy of the people who once lived here and the culture they forged.

"It's about immigration," said O'Flaherty. "These islands were once filled with people and families. What happened to them? Did they go to Chicago? Australia? Where did they go?"