THE YELLOW RIVER - Seán McSweeney & Gerard Smyth

called “ his personal language as a painter” and how he “renewed and brought
innovation, and a wholly original approach, to Irish landscape painting”.
Before we ever met I was aware of the McSweeney link to Clongill where his former
family home still stands, not much more than the proverbial stone’s throw
from my own mother’s home place and those fields where I did my boyhood
dreaming. Although his links with Sligo, through his mother, are more firmly
established I discovered that Seán’s father, from whom the painting gene was
inherited, was a Meath man. Over the years Seán has frequently acknowledged
this transmission of the gift – from father to son.
When I was first invited to make work for the Solstice Arts Centre that would, in
essence, reflect my relationship with Meath any hesitancy I might have had was
to do with the fact that I had been writing poems of memory about the place and
its ghosts for so long. In The Fullness of Time, a selection from over the course of
my writing life, there are about eighteen Meath-related poems. My country life,
as much as my inner city world, has been generous in the material it provided.
But such hesitancy was short-lived – this after all was my second first place
and as much a place or origin and of first observations as my urban streets. The
emotional tug had never dissipated. The invitation might well have been to a
homecoming.
Apart from familial roots, the emergence of my first poems took place in Meath.
Among early poems written during the summer of 1968 was one titled “Town”,
subsequently published in New Irish Writing in The Irish Press. That poem –
though not naming it – was about Navan, my introduction to the daily dullness
of the Irish market town in that era. When my first small booklet of poems appeared,
the poem most frequently noted was “Today Is Not Enough”, one of the
few poems to which I have attached a dateline: Wilkinstown, August 1969. I am
not sure if my 18-year-old self fully understood that I was attempting to freezeframe
a moment in that “tumbledown yard” and its adjacent fields, to create a
perpetual present.
In a sense that is what Seán has been doing in his wonderful and inward landscape
imagery. When I was asked about collaborating with a visual artist his
name came automatically to my tongue – not only out of my regard for his work
and my knowledge of our common bond through a shared set of topographical
references but also because I had never seen any paintings of his depicting any
aspect of the Meath landscape, although his paintings of Sligo and Wicklow display
an intimate feeling for land, sea and sky and are counted among the finest
interpretations of the Irish landscape by a contemporary Irish artist.
But now he has rectified that omission and produced for this book, and the exhibition
which also forms part of our Meath project, a body of exquisite and lyrical
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