My Sketching Course In Artform, Dunmore East, Co. Waterford

Monday 23rd September

This autumn, my head is full of nature subjects for sketching. My students and I have been loving the autumnal subjects we’ve been capturing in our sketchbooks. I make two more paintings, for my brother’s birthday. They are small and square and look very nice in their mounts, I think. He seems pleased when I present them to him over dinner in an Indian restaurant, with our parents.

Thursday 26th September

I’m waiting at a bus stop in the pouring rain, in the village of Kilmacanogue, or rather, separated from the village by a fast six-lane motorway. I am on my way to Dunmore East in Co. Waterford, to start a three-day course on sketching objects from nature. I am fifteen minutes early, so I have a long time to reflect on Kilmacanogue, one of the two villages near my childhood home in the Glencree Valley. One day, I will tell you all about the idyllic setting in which I grew up. Long years of childhood, playing in the forest, by the river, in the fields and in my mother’s beautiful garden gave way to the lonely bewilderment that is the lot of a precocious teenager. Kilmacanogue was the location of many a social gaffe and being utterly out of my depth with the cool kids who somehow knew how to ‘teenage’.

In the rain across the motorway, from my vantage point today, the village doesn’t look nearly as intimidating as I thought it was back in the 1980s.

I have decided to get to my destination using public transport. I love letting someone else do the driving. But the bus is very late, and I must get a connecting bus in Wexford with the same company, with ten minutes between the two, so I am getting a little anxious.

Twenty minutes after its scheduled arrival time, the bus pulls up. I tell the bus driver about my concerns, and he tells me the stop to get off at to make sure I get the Waterford bus. To be on the safe side I ring the bus company but all grumpy thoughts about Irish public transport vanish when the nice lady on the phone tells me the connecting bus will wait for me if I am not there when he passes, and to give the bus driver my name so he knows he has all his passengers on board.

I am anxious about the bus driver making up the time he lost through being late, but a passenger he picks up on the way is very drunk and takes forever to extract money from his wallet for his ticket. He is in a black denim jacket and skin-tight black jeans, scrawny, in his fifties or sixties. He sorts it out eventually, the bus gets going again and fifteen minutes later we get to Wexford. Only myself and the drunk guy get off. There’s no one at the bus stop but us, waiting for the connecting bus to Waterford City. I just know the drunk guy is going to want to chat.

“Hello, how are you,” he says.

I ignore him, because I do not want to engage in any way. I am normally very friendly to strangers – much too friendly, according to my kids.

“I said, Hello, how are you,” he says again, more loudly. There’s a note of anger in his voice.

It’s quite clear I’m not being given a choice as to whether I want to engage or not. I am resentful because I am certain that if I were not female he wouldn’t even bother with his greeting, never mind insist. I mumble the most terse “hello” I can muster.

Then he starts to fumble with his fly, mutters “excuse me, I have to p-“, pushes past me and stops at the bushes, just next to the bus shelter. I move out from under the bus shelter, into the rain, anything to get further from this man.

Two more women arrive, dropped by car. Their bus arrives within a minute: they are off to the airport. The drunk man insists on putting their luggage into the hold area of the bus, and I can see they want to do it themselves, but like me, they’re not being given the option. The driver gets out and takes over, and the drunk man immediately cedes luggage wrangling to the driver. He retreats…in my direction, of course. He is in the mood to chat so I pretend to be on the phone to keep him away, but it doesn’t entirely work: he still talks to, or rather at me. I am annoyed that in my mid-fifties I am still not able to make a man go away.

I share my travails in the family group chat – for their entertainment as much as anything – and my husband sends me money for a taxi: seconds later he adds “so that you can’t play the martyr” and I send the money right back. But I haven’t taken public transport to martyr myself: I genuinely like the freedom it affords and eavesdropping on the public, even bothersome drunk men, if only after the event.

I make my connecting bus and hop off in Waterford City, and I have another hour before the last connection will take me to Dunmore East. It’s raining harder now. I need to buy art paper, and contact a friend of mine who lives locally to see where he recommends I go, but I can’t do much chatting with him over Instagram because huge raindrops are making the phone screen impossible to use. I have that awful feeling of not having a clue what to do next, and I am starting to regret my travel choice. I go into Penney’s to get out of the rain, and it’s warm, dry, roomy and smells familiar. I text my friend and tell him all is well now, I am in the embrace of Penney’s. Then I hear a commotion and a young woman is fighting on the street just outside the entrance to the store. She’s in her late teens perhaps, with bleached hair and fake eyelashes that look like she has let her six-year-old niece draw them on with a black Sharpie. First she’s shouting at another woman of about the same age, then at a young man. I feel very sorry for her: I think she has no one to look after her. It’s really pouring now and the angry young woman, in her leopardskin bomber jacket and leggings, paints a very sorry picture.

But I still can’t find the art shop, and I ask two schoolboys for directions. They are polite and direct me to the shop I’m looking for. I buy the art pad I want, and the paper bag I’m given threatens to burst in the rain before I will make it onto the bus for Dunmore East. The bus stop is crowded with oddballs, but seeing as I am making notes of people’s conversations on my phone I guess I am an oddball too. I enjoy this thoroughly, but looking back over the notes later, I realise their conversations were only funny to me, at the time.

In Dunmore East I check in to the Strand Inn and order dinner. The rain pours down outside the restaurant and it’s wonderfully cosy indoors. I sit in a little nook and look out the window over the eponymous strand, and while I wait for my food to arrive I sketch the sea and the cliff, barely visible through the gloom (making sure to do the water first to get the tide and colour right) but before long a wonderful burger arrives and by the time I am finished it’s pitch dark outside. I have a white space at the bottom of the page, and the next day I add people enjoying some late September sunshine, even if it means the tide and the sky no longer match.

Friday 27th – Sunday 29th September

Over the next few days I teach seven students from around the world. They come from the US, Ireland and the UK. The theme is “sketching nature” and the idea is to go out to the hedgerows and beaches and collect natural stuff, bring it back to the studio and sketch using a variety of approaches.

On the first day, we do seaweed and crabs, to practice accurate drawing and wet-in-wet techniques:

brambles and bits of dried vegetation to practice drawing and observation:

I do these sketches on loose paper, meaning I have to cut them out and stick them into my sketchbook afterwards. I don’t have many blank pages left, which explains why there’s a drawing of my son Paddy on the left of the page. He looks a bit funny in the sketch because after assuring me he won’t move, he unzips his jacket, rearranges his hair, leans back, sips his beer and so on. He is not entirely happy with the results, but he is a great sport when it comes to my constant sketching of him, and anyway, it’s his own fault for moving.

On the third day we do extensive values sketches. It’s Sunday, and we’re due a huge storm. I go out an hour before class is due to start to collect fungi, but there are none. Then I see chestnuts all over the road outside the Protestant church, and I see there’s a horse chestnut tree just inside the railings, in the cemetery. I nip inside and scoop up handfuls of chestnuts, being pelted in the back by falling missiles (they hurt). Back at the art studio everyone makes value studies and it goes so well I decide to do it for my online students too.

At one point there’s silence in the studio and all we can hear is the sound of the storm outside, which has made landfall: rain is pelting the rooflights, wind is battering the studio. All is warm and cosy inside. There are dark mutterings of avoiding the roads until the following day, but I want to get home. One of the students, a Galway woman, offers me a lift home: to those of us who live along the west coast it’s a mere breeze, and she is unfazed. (In the event, the four-hour journey passes delightfully, as she is a marvellous companion.)

Nature studies – as in, bits and pieces of stuff that you find outdoors that will make your house extremely untidy – are great to sketch. Here are a few examples from my students’ work:

Dunmore East is a fantastic place for a few days, and Artform, run by the inimitable Martina O’Byrne, is second to none when it comes to art workshops. You can stay in the Strand Inn – which I love – and if the weather is nice you can swim in the sea just outside the restaurant and bar. I swim on the Saturday evening with one of my students, the fantastic Noreen, who drives me home the next evening. The storm on Sunday is as wild and dangerous as the sunshine on Saturday is blissful, but that’s Ireland’s unpredictable weather for you, Sunny Southeast or not. If you’re looking for a few days’ relaxation and art, I recommend Artform. The studio is warm and inviting and Martina has a great coffee machine – and a French patisserie just a few doors up, whose freshly-baked goodies Martina treats the class to when she can.

This blog is about a sketching course that took place in September! It has taken me more then two weeks to write, as I am distracted with other projects, as usual…

• I am writing / drawing a comic book set in my area. There is a comic book festival in Lucerne, Switzerland next year called Fumetto. The deadline is 14th December, for which you must have four pages of comic done. I hope to make the deadline, so have been scribbling away like crazy.
• I am trying to make sure that any delays in the arrival of my SketchPockets won’t be my fault, so I answer all emails as soon as they come in. There have been a few surprises in terms of added costs (customs and so on) and, it must be said, I am frustrated at how long it’s all taking. I am worried now that I will be too late for the Christmas market.
• I spend a few days in Wicklow, and head to the Schoolhouse for Art in Enniskerry, where I meet with Lana, the director. We agree that I will begin a 6-week course teaching on-the-spot sketching, on Tuesday afternoons, starting on 5th November. More on that next time, but head to their website if you are interested in signing up.

Of course, lots of sketching has gone on in the three weeks since the course in Dunmore East…and meanwhile, if you have a few minutes, here’s a flick-through of my latest sketchbook: https://youtu.be/-bQZV3ltIns which I hope you enjoy!

See you next time!