Feile’s Wake

2002

32" X 34"

Oil on Panel

SOLD

A reprise.
A theme revisited.
An unfinished thought.
Early in March and Gulliver and I have paused on the studio steps to watch a pair of sparrows.
They are using the angled support beams as a slide. Fluttering to the top of the board they cling for
purchase and then one tiny appendage braves the incline, lifts, and lets go. There is the briefest surprise in the
impish bird’s eyes and, with all aviatory grace aside, one leg reaching straight ahead,
she slides down the length of the ramp.

We have spent the week watching Bill Moyers as he revisited the Joseph Campbell interviews, Power of Myth.
Almost 20 years since the original broadcast. Back then I used the audio tapes as painting background,
listening over and over to absorb the lessons.
I adopted the “Follow Your Bliss” theme and it became my mantra.
I invested great energy in trying to “get” the principal of the authentic life.
It was the best seller of all the quotes I carved into the slats of my rockers in the chairmaking days.

And he was right.

After decades in pursuit of my bliss I can look back and discover that I have been enjoying that state all along.
It is only with the benefits of distance and experience and time that I can hear his words now and
understand the depth and richness of a life spent in the pursuit of one’s dreams.

So I stop to sit on the studio steps to observe this fanciful feathered game.
The intensity of their play is a wonderful contrast to the mysteries of light and shadow in the painting in progress.
A composition revisited from an earlier pencil sketch.
Imagening the wee hours in a fiddle player’s bedroom
after an all night Feile (a regional Irish step-dancing competion). The wild energy of the dance having all but
exploded the instrument. And the shadow brooding on the wall with one dance left in her.
Like the Campbell tapes, this painting has been waiting for the maturity of the evolving artist
to catch up with it.
And all the faerie sparrows are dancing in it’s wake.