I Think I’ve Died And Gone To Heaven

A Room Of One’s Own

When I was a little girl, my bedroom was along a long corridor, on the lower floor of a split-level bungalow. The house was built by my parents in the 1960s, on a mountainside in a forest. When I was sick and had to stay in bed, I was all on my own down there along that long corridor. My numerous siblings were at school, my father at work, my mother a long way out of earshot at the other side of the house (although if I remember shouting at the top of my lungs, I couldn’t have been that ill). But if I had an old magazine, a scrapbook, a pair of scissors and some glue, I was happy as could be. Once I was back on my feet, my mother would pull the bed away from the wall to clear out the pile of tiny scraps and snippets of paper that had fallen down the crack. As I became old enough to do it myself, even I was a little shocked at the volume of scraps of paper that would be littering the carpet, glinting white in the gloom under the bed.

These days, I work from a studio at the end of my garden. Because I live in the middle of the country, my garden is large. Not country estate large – I don’t need a quad bike to get around – but big enough to have a miniature woods in which live foxes and stoats and pheasants and things. The miniature woods lines one side and the back of the property, and my studio is at the edge of the woods at the back. It is idyllic, but it was hard-won.

When my husband Marcel and I started to build our house in the early 2000s, it was the start of a nightmare for me. We had both been so idealistic and ambitious, and had the grandest of grand plans. Being naïve and having little experience in house building (nor yet fully understanding my husband’s character), I found myself raising three small children in a “temporary” outbuilding a full six years after the building project had begun. That led to a quasi-mental breakdown, but that’s another story, and one I will share with you sometime.

Living in that little place had its ups and downs. Women who visited me shook their heads sadly and said “I could never live like this.” (Note: maybe not a good thing to say to women who are doing their best, but who are struggling.) One very lovely woman said “What are you talking about? This is lovely! So cosy! I don’t feel one bit sorry for you now!” My father said, “Those children will grow up so secure. They’re never more than ten feet from you.” And if I’m being honest, the parties I had there, where the guests’ roaring and merriment took place LESS than ten feet from my three sleeping children (who never woke up) were fantastic…although anyone who accepts an invitation to a party in a hovel is already filtered for being great craic.

So my kids may have been secure, but it came at the expense of my health. The pressure of living in a shack caused my marbles to roll away, one by one, until I had lost quite a few of them. There were many elements that contributed to this. My thwarted urge to create, a diagnosis of an auto-immune condition, three small kids with no family nearby, no time whatsoever to myself, little chance to indulge in nesting, living in a shack, the pressure of building – and the ugliness of living on a building site. It was hard to carry out any tasks as a professional artist in a tiny space with three little people tearing around. I became conscious of the need for a studio of my own. But in a domestic debate where one person is more tired than the other, the tired person loses. With a child seeming to always be either on the breast or in a buggy, it was a long time before I had the strength to stand up for myself.

Marcel and I built a beautiful playground for the children. It was all dark wood and garden, surrounded by yet more trees. When you stood on the walkway that ran along the top, you could see the estuary at the end of the garden, the rolling fields and the beautiful open countryside all around. I would sit on one of the swings and look towards the back of the garden and the mini-woods: if we had all this space, surely there was enough room for a studio for me? There was a building at the back of the garden, made from the leftover scraps of SIPs (thermally insulated building panels that replace blocks or brick) that we’d built our house from. I suffer badly in Ireland’s cold climate and with my Raynaud’s disease I needed a studio that would be warm. If it were to be a stand-alone building with four sides exposed to the elements, then it would have to be highly insulated…where could I source more of those panels, I wondered? I knew I would be on my own with this project. And when you make enquiries in builders’ providers, you enter a man’s world. My father, a builder and engineer, says they compete to be as rude as possible in these places. He’s right. So my feeble enquiries got nowhere, and I didn’t have the energy to insist.

One day, Marcel and I cycled to the local village to get milk, and came back with a boat shed. We disagree about whose idea it was to buy it, but one way or another it was soon standing at the back of the garden beside the shed that was built out of highly-insulated leftovers, which had become a garden equipment (and redundant playground accessories) storage place. Foundation, screed floor, shelving – the lot.

Meanwhile we were out of the “temporary” outbuilding and into our lovely, if unfinished, house. Marcel moved into that outbuilding, our previous tiny home, to use as his office.

If only I could find a place that would supply SIP panels. But where would I put it, now that the back of the garden was filling up? We also had an enormous polytunnel just beside the sheds.

Slowly, through the fog of fatigue and distraction, a thought began to take shape. Marcel had three outbuildings that were for more or less manly purposes. I had none. Him: three. Me: none.

And then it hit me. There was already a SIP-built building, fully insulated, on my property, right under my nose. The shed full of garden stuff (and a swallows’ nest). I decided to emphasise the three:none ratio, assert myself and claim it. There was a tiny bit of resistance, but no one can wish to maintain that ratio and keep marital harmony.

However, once the situation had been spelled out Marcel embraced the idea, and did most of the converting of the shed into a studio for me. He dry-walled it, insulated the roof, panelled the ceiling, plumbed it for water, connected power and wifi, installed a wood-burning stove, clad it in heraklith panels; and added the finishing touch, the bit that transformed the shed from outbuilding to log cabin, the raw larch boards screwed to the exterior. Meanwhile I had triple-glazed windows and doors from Lithuania installed, reassembled the wonderful, heavy table that Marcel had made as a young man for a work table, and Marcel installed an old granite sink we’d bought from a small ad some fifteen years earlier. There was a LOT of begging and cajoling to get him to actually do all of these jobs, but he did them. Finally, I put a lovely and very old rug on the floor, slit a memory foam mattress lengthways down the middle and reupholstered it as an unusual sofabed, had solid oak slatted blinds made to measure, hung curtains across the French doors, and I had a beautiful home from home. It was as cosy and comfy as could be.

In September 2019 I took possession of Atelier Róisín (I just made that up now), seventeen years after Marcel made the shed from the leftover panels of our house. From the day I moved in, it has been a dream come true. I found my marbles – they were in the studio. I indulge every creative whim I have there, just as if I am still in my bedroom at home, swamped in tiny bits of cut-up paper. My mother has always said “if you wake up one day surrounded by scissors, glue and bits of paper, you’ll know you’ve died and gone to heaven.”

Turns out she’s a prophet.

And It Comes With A Live-In Handyman

These days, Marcel is so happy for me in my studio. I see him coming down the path sometimes, hot cup of tea for me in hand, or he comes and rootles for sweets (that I paint but don’t eat), like a very tall boar or giant mouse. If the wifi drops or there’s a rodent home invasion, Marcel sees to it immediately, and he would do anything to see my workflow uninterrupted.

Here’s my studio: the chimney should be higher up the roof, and I made it much too short, but if you would like to sketch it along with me you can do so here: https://youtu.be/I2_HzIu7iY0?si=4Kypro2CW1T-jRk7

No Flies On Us

My elder daughter Honor and I spent Sunday in the Botanic Gardens. I arrived a little before Honor, just as the gates opened at 10.00am. I walked up the little hill to one of the palm houses, where a member of staff was still sweeping the floor, the clattering of her dustpan and brush ruining the audio I was recording for a video. My plan had been to whip out my portable chair and settle in for a long sketch in the cosiness of the greenhouse interior, but the Victorians (who built the place) didn’t think of that when they designed the paths between plant displays. Not to be thwarted, I stood in a narrow passageway, let my SketchPocket fall open and I sketched the pitcher plants…

…doing everything from start to finish on the spot, as always. I liked the gentle sound of flies around me. I think that on a visceral level, the buzzing of flies is annoying because we feel out of control in the face of their bothering us: if they wish to land on us, or bite us, there is little we can do, because slapping at them is futile. Therefore, the buzzing of flies loses its power to annoy when one is surrounded by pitcher plants, because we know that the pitcher plants have our backs.They are hungry for fly-meat, and they will take it from here. It’s a bit like when you’ve been awoken in the dead of night by the scratching of a mouse: make the effort to get up and set a trap, and you can swiftly drift back into the land of nod.

Honor and I headed outside and whipped out our comfy little portable chairs, and sketched the lilies outside the palm houses. Then we walked around the Botanic Gardens, Honor uttering cries of delight at the terrapin in the lily pond, the squirrels, the magpies, the seagulls…even the pigeons. The plants got the occasional mention.

Sketchbooking Workshops Coming Up

• I still have one place left in my Urban Sketching workshop 15th-17th August 2024. If you’d like to join us, details can be found here: https://roisincure.com/product/colour-and-charm-in-the-west-of-ireland-workshop-15-17th-aug/
• I will be teaching with the theme Concertina Sketchbooking in Peloponnes Greece 23rd to 30th April 2025, and with the same theme in the foothills of the French Pyrenees 23rd t0 30th August 2025. Save the dates if they sound like something you are interested in.
• There were still places left in my Nature Sketchbooking workshop in Waterford, 27th-29th September 2024 the last time I was in touch with Martina in Artform. You can find details on artform.ie.

I’ll chat wth you soon…from my litte piece of heaven in the woods!