THE YELLOW RIVER - Seán McSweeney & Gerard Smyth

watercolour depictions of a distinctive landscape marked by trees and pastoral
acres. A landscape that holds places dear to both of us, including that point of
reference we chose as the title – The Yellow River. As Seán revealed the work that
began to emerge after each visit to old haunts – his and mine – and days spent
sketching, I detected a vital reconnection as well as the birth of a creative affinity
with the Meath side of his heritage. The way in which he has comprehended the
spirit and moods of a place so different to his usual stamping ground in the west
is a testament to his great artistry.
For obvious reasons I was particularly moved by and grateful for the
“Knightstown” series, his paintings of the cottage in which my mother was
born and which was my annual summer destination for the first two decades of
my life. Without my ever mentioning to him its importance in my memory, he
intuitively took notice of that small window that “rationed the light”. Looking
at his “Yellow River” I was reminded of the words of a song of the Sixties, “Ballad
of Easy Rider”, recorded by the Byrds:
Wherever that river goes
That’s where I want to be…
Remarking on Seán’s oil paintings, my former Irish Times colleague, Brian Fallon,
has pointed out that his “sensuous feeling for paint is something innate” – and
that quality is everywhere evident in these new paintings.
For both Seán and myself this project has involved acts of retrieval, going back
to the repository of touchstones scattered around Wikinstown, Clongill and
Knightstown and their surrounding areas. My frequent returns in the past two
years, revisiting and rediscovering those touchstones has stimulated a widening
of my view of the past as well as releasing hidden memories. Of course
memory and imagination coalesce and in doing so “modify and transform experience”
as the American poet Richard Hugo put it.
There were key associative prompts that had the power to immediately relocate
me back to the time and places of those summer reveries. One such prompt was
in the course of a conversation with Seán when he happened to mention that
Yellow River. I hadn’t ever given much thought to this lesser river of the Meath
landscape but suddenly its name evoked a whole series of images from my days
on the farm. Likewise, hearing a Jim Reeves song on the radio reminded me of
the very hot August day in 1964 when I heard news of his death on the kitchen
transistor having come in from the fields to get buttermilk for the haymakers.
Over the past two years, in the course of my Meath journeys to and through
the past, I have come to recognise the truth in what Seamus Heaney once said:
“There are only certain stretches of ground over which the poet’s divining road
can come to life”.
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