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Pauline Flynn is a Visual Artist/Poet. She studied visual art at the Dunlaoghaire School of Art & Design and the National College of Art & Design Dublin, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Kyoto University of Arts. She has worked as a professional artist since 1985 and has exhibited in Ireland, United Kingdom, Japan and China. Her imagery is abstract using Acrylic/Mixed Media.In 2008 she took a break from painting and in 2010 completed an MA in Creative Writing at University College Dublin, where she began to write poetry and was shortlisted for the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award the same year. Her work is published in poetry journals including Poetry Ireland Review, the Eavan Boland Special issue in 2023, Skylight, The Waxed Lemon, (Visual Art), Into the Light, The Boyne Berries, and Sixteen. (Irl). Light, a journal of poetry and photography (USA), Orbis, and The Blue Nib (UK), She works and lives in County Wicklow in Ireland and finds painting and writing poetry to be a perfect complement to each other.
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Artist’s Statement
For this issue I’ve chosen to share B&W artworks. Two Japanese calligraphic works, three paintings inspired by damp patches on the walls of a quarry and five abstract paintings from the Riband Series I shared with you in the Spring issue. I’ve selected poems with a Japanese flavour, though not Haiku’s. Until I began to write poetry, I was very drawn to Haiku and often used them as titles for paintings. As with my own attention to abstraction, I loved the pared back brevity of a haiku poem.
Since my student days I’ve always been attracted to artists who worked in black and white – Robert Motherwell, Bridget Reilly, Franz Kline and others. It was when I went to Japan in the late eighties that I came to a fuller appreciation of the impact that these two colours can have. Studying Japanese calligraphy, ‘Sho’, in Kyoto, opened up much more to me than just black and white on a page. Through hours of practice, writing the same character over and over on soft paper using brush and ink, sitting on the floor at a low table, I often fell into a place of supreme concentration. On the advice of my teacher, I selected Chinese characters to write and develop into an artwork while keeping true to each stroke of the character.
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Mu is the name of this character. In Buddhism it encompasses a concept of no thing, nothing, nothingness ─ the pure state of consciousness before any experiences or knowledge is known.
When I was creating this shape of the character/word, I was reminded of the leaning trees, surviving fierce wind and rain, on the tops of walls and ditches in Ireland, I thought a lot about their tenacity in my search for harmony and beauty in this work.
This character is called MA and is another Japanese concept that inspires me. In western art this is called ‘negative space’ but in Japan it has a combined meaning of time and space, gap and pause. This character/word expresses ‘gate above, sun below’.
The writer Junichiro Tanizaki wrote “we find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and darkness, that one thing against another creates”.
THE CALLIGRAPHER
i.m. Roma Robinson
on a square cushion
at a low table
you tuck your legs
under your body
lower its weight
onto your heels
straighten your back
you pour water
into the shallow bowl
of a whet stone
rub an ink stick
back and forth
over the stone’s bed
turn the water black
you dip the brush
lift it ink filled
and set sail
over the vast expanse
of a sheet of white paper
offering us passage
into the night
OUTCAST
Under his umbrellas,
he sits in full lotus and reads.
No raindrop disturbs his reverie,
or dampens his bundle of books.
Sounds drone from the highway
above Green-O-Dori Avenue
near Ikebukuro Station, Tokyo.
Soup smells from the noodle shop
across the street whet his tastebuds,
men in the Police Box stand guard
at his back. He takes a daily walk
through Zoshigaya Cemetry
inhales sweet incense on the air,
nods to Soseki where he sleeps.
Day after anonymous day his soft
focus settles on the still life’s
and film clips of his existence,
the ticking clock.
MT. HIEI
From our room above the trees
I woke as colours in the sky
Bleed from vermilion into pink,
turquoise to cornflower blue.
Far below, Lake Biwa touches
the feet of the forest,
treetops sway – a strange sea.
Oh, to sleep in the crook of a bough,
dive into the depths.
THE SHOGUN’S DREAM
for the Silver Pavilion
was of the night.
The building silver-leafed
and a sea of shimmering sand
floodlit by a moon,
held in a black sky.
I visit the garden in daylight
thronged with hordes of tourists
and imagine it through his minds-eye.
MY TABLE
after Yeats
Fine teak grain, honey colour,
a solid top on sturdy legs, draped
with an antique indigo ‘furoshiki’,
a gift from Kiyohara.
Red apples in a white basin
Perfumes the room, and lamplight shines
on patches in the thinning cloth
–––a crescent, a spinning top, a misshapen star.
My elliptic patch puts right a rent
opened in a careless moment,
my effort alongside women who stitched
the cloth before me and bundled up
their goods in this square of blue.
Through a rain drenched window,
red shock of Japanese maple blazes
in the damp garden, the glow
from the computer screen
stark against creeping dusk.
SNAPSHOT
You and I are downtown Kyoto.
On the spur of the moment
I’d asked a stranger
to take our photograph.
Our last one together,
arms around each other
girdled by the crowd.
KYOTO SUBURB
In my studio, on a quiet street,
between the Golden Pavilion
and Ryoanji Zen Garden,
there are days like this.
Days when the air is heavy
and I can’t lift the brush
to make another stroke.
Mosquitos show no mercy,
and moisture runs in rivulets
down my spine.
Days when all that I can do is lie down
on the tatami floors’ earthy aroma,
in the soft toned interior
of the old Japanese house,
soothed by sounds
of the suburbs.
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FUKUSHIMA
meters,
detectors
micro sieverts
geiger counters
instadose dosimeters
that read radiation levels
processed through
a proprietary algorithm
on the home computer
For twenty-five years Mister Matsuda
bread rare breed cows in the village of Litate
and one day a beauty was born. He named her
Princess Kiyo. On a sunny morning
in the year Heisei 23 Princess Kiyo stands still
as he hoses her body with clear water
from the mountain, washes and dries her,
brushes her coat to a high shine, then herds
her into a waiting truck and watches, half blinded
by tears until it rounded the last bend in the road.
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FROM THE PLANE WINDOW
Easy to be overwhelmed by the immensity of space
beyond the glass, the cloudless sky, where we hang
above snowcapped peaks that plunge into dark ravines;
such blackness, a depth your mind fears to plummet.
I’ve left behind soft rolling hills smothered in purple
and white heather, where the wind whistles
in fresh air and the dog can chase a herd of deer
with no hope of catching up. Where bog cotton
waves in swathes, and rocks funnel amber stained
water through long wet winters. Ahead,
I’ll wake to watch the sun rise through a ring of cloud
circling Mount Fuji and erupt into the heart of light.
The High Window 