Delphi Valley Ireland – a journey into my visual memory
Driving through the Delphi Valley in Connemara on route to Westport as the sun was setting recently gave me a special kind of challenge. The batteries of both camera and phone had run out of juice just when the scenery was becoming a glowing, spectacular vision of beauty – but I had to capture it somehow… Armed with only a ballpoint pen and the blank reverse pages of our rally roadbook, whilst driving along twisty roads in an open top vintage car, I drew the quickest, if wonkiest, of sketches – the best I could manage – whilst focusing on fusing the sights I was viewing into my visual memory.
I don’t have a photographic memory, so the experience and the feeling of this journey all had to be rolled up into a concentrated essence of the place and saved into my brain’s newly formatted “Delphi drive”. To be honest the lack of a camera was a blessing and gave me the freedom to just “look” – and the sketching made me look as hard, seeking to capture the pure nature of everything in front of me. I soaked it up – feasted on every moment.
This is one of the paintings – in acrylic and oil pastel – made from one of the many resulting sketches and that fused-in memory. It is a subject that I will have an ongoing creative relationship with, an evening that I will strive to capture – and a method of working that I shall seek to develop.