Changeable (Fair)weather

For most of my life, I considered my mother to be the creative parent. Her hands were amazing; she was an incredibly talented piano teacher, cake-icer, tatter, crocheter, sewer, folk artist, china doll maker, stuffed animal maker, and so on.

On the other hand, my father was an engineer, and I saw him as practical and pragmatic. However, after he retired, he took up painting and showed some raw, albeit naïve, talent.

He started with watercolour. Many people who take up this medium without instruction mistake watercolour for poster or acrylic paint, putting so much paint on the paper that it becomes a solid opaque colour. The beauty of watercolour is that it is meant to be put on in thin translucent layers, which is quite challenging to master. At the time, I had done some watercolour work but didn’t have much of a grasp of it myself, so I was not capable of giving him much direction. I did, however, have a good understanding and feel for oil painting, so I suggested he give that a crack.

He took to it and became quite enthralled, and he became quite prolific. It was one of my greatest pleasures to have a joint show at Jan Murphy’s Gallery of landscapes we painted together in the foothills around Killarney.

After he passed away a few years ago, I found an old manuscript that he had illustrated when he was a young man. It had…