January/February 2009     home

Last year, I showed Brian Roberts, the owner of The Waterside Restaurant, a pop-art painting of one plane shooting down another. It had the word "Whaam!" blazed across it. Brian liked the idea of a pop-art exhibition, and immediately suggested some historic events in Graig that could be illustrated with pop-art, starting with the blowing of the bridge by the English army in 1798.

Here are the works that came from that meeting.

Boom!   40 x 30 inches, Mixed Media on Canvas

During the 1798 uprising, the English army blew up an arch of the bridge into Graig. This was to keep the rampaging rebels in County Carlow out of County Kilkenny, as the bridge spans the border between Carlow and Kilkenny.

You can still see the scar on the bridge today because different cap stones were used when the arch was rebuilt.

You might notice that the Abbey church, behind the bridge, was mostly in ruins with just a small section roofed and renovated by the protestant church.

The renovated part of the church was never used because local Catholics resented Protestants taking over "their" building. Catholics continually vandalised the church so that the Protestant clergy were afraid to use it.

The money spent renovating the church was not all wasted. The protestant clergy took the roof with them when they built their own church a few years later !

Craash!   24 x 20 inches, Mixed Media on Canvas

The Duiske Abbey fell into ruins after the fifteen-hundreds. In 1774, the roof had fallen in, but the octagonal tower was still standing. That was about to change.

Being in Ireland, the tower did not collapse at night when nobody was looking, there is a story to it.

Their mothers probably told them "Don't go playing in that old tower, it's dangerous". This time, mum was right. Just as the two boys were about to go into the Abbey tower, there was a sharp "crack". A goat rushed out, barging in to the boys, who ran away in panic. The tower collapsed behind them. The goat had saved their lives.

Blaam!   24 x 20 inches, Mixed Media on Canvas

In 1888, a confrontation between poachers and gamekeepers on Brandon hill got out of hand and resulted in two deaths.

It started when a gamekeeper shot one of the poachers dogs, and the poacher shot the gamekeeper in hot blood. The gamekeeper later died of the wound.

The gamekeepers fired back and the poacher also died later.

Hangman   24 x 20 inches, Mixed Media on Canvas

In 1812, two lads from Graig eloped with a pair of girls and married them. The girls both had a good inheritance, which might have had something to do with it. Anyway, the four were soon apprehended and the lads were put on trial for kidnapping. The girls testified against the lads, even though the lads swore that the girls encouraged them and were party to it.

Both lads were found guilty and hanged. The painting shows them lads hanging from the gallows, reflected in one of the girls eyes.

Crocodile tears, or genuine remorse ? Both girls were shunned and even spat on ever after.

Attack!   30 x 24 inches, Mixed Media on Canvas

It is 1798 and young Thomas Cloney is leading the second abortive raid that year on Borris House. His mission is to capture guns. His force is armed with pikes, heroism and a miniature cannon.

"General" Cloney became his nick-name because, although he was only 23 years old, he took on leadership in the rebellion like a duck takes to water.

Normally, he would have been executed for his part in the uprising, but he must have had a magic charm. All he got was a short prison sentence, although he continued to revel in being a rebel all his life, and even wrote a book about it ! He died of old age at Graig in 1850.

The orange-white-and-green background colours signify the Irish flag of today, even though it had not been invented then and only came to be associated with the rebel cause in the Easter Rising of 1916.

The Aerial Combat Paintings

One of my favorite famous paintings is "Whaam!" by Roy Lichtemstein, which is an interpretation of a picture in a children's comic. On the left is Roy's work, and the original cartoon:

I love Roy's simplified interpretation of the original comic picture. No wonder it was a key painting at the beginning of the Pop Art movement.

On the other hand, I am disappointed that he lost a lot of the energy of the original. To me, his attacking plane looks more like a glider floating in the sky, and the explosion seems a little lazy. Also, he based the attacking plane on a propeller-driven Mustang from another story in the comic, which looks strange attacking a jet.

I decided to work on my own aerial combat pictures, trying to bring in more energy, and the sensation of attack and flying. Here they are. The planes in this series are both from World-War-Two, the American Mustang and the German Focke-Wulf 190.

Whram!   20 x 30 inches, Mixed Media on Canvas

Blam   48 x 30 inches, Mixed Media on Canvas

Whroom!   39 x 18 inches, Mixed Media on Canvas

Zing!   20 x 18 inches, Mixed Media on Canvas

Whaam!   39 x 18 inches, Mixed Media on Canvas

The Autopsy in the Abbey

Oh, yes, I nearly forgot The Autopsy In The Abbey. Browsing through the files in Graig library, the following newspaper headline stopped me in my tracks:

In 1829, while the priest was away, a body was exhumed from the Abbey grounds for a post-mortem. The autopsy was inconsiderately performed in the Abbey itself, as a public spectacle in front of a crowd. Afterwards, the priest closed the Abbey for two weeks while everyone did penance.

Study - The Autopsy in the Abbey