Description
Bluebells – Méaracáin
Lands of Eoghan Festival, Clonmany 2017
We went walking in a Donegal woodland in the spring of 2017 – Kathryn and I – and were greeted by a vibrant carpet of flowering bluebells. Breath-taking! I like the Irish word méaracán to describe them, although it actually means thimble. I can imagine young children plucking the bluebells and putting a bell on each finger rather like fairy thimbles. Other Irish words for bluebells are cloigíní gorma (little blue bells) and coinnle corra (tapered or pointed candles).
These paintings are not meant to be botanically accurate in their depictions of bluebells; rather, impressions of them in the half-light or dappled light, or even in the half-darkness of evening, spectre-like and phantom-like, radiating and illuminating their blueness.
