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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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It is always sad to part company with each year’s resident artist.  However, I would like to thank Pauline for enriching The High Window with the quality of her work as an artist and poet. It has also been a pleasure working with her. [Ed].

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Artist’s Statement

Over the past year, thanks to David’s invitation to be the resident artist for 2024 in The High Window, I’ve had a wonderful opportunity to share some poems with you and to look closely at my visual artwork, especially the new paintings (Riband Series), I’ve been making and developing since 2020.

Still working with five shapes, the paintings are developing in two directions.  One is minimal and one is more layered.

I’m allowing the process to guide my decisions to create paintings that do not contain inherent meaning; paintings comprised of shapes, forms, colours, and the harmonisation of these elements in a two-dimensional space.

It’s been a turbulent few years on our planet. What’s evolving with this work are paintings that offer a quiet, ordered space wherein the viewer can contemplate and dream.

The paintings here are 25 x 35 cm, and 35 x 45 cm, acrylic on canvas.

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PROVIDENCE

It’s snowing.
Under the duvet it’s warm.

Warm as that summer an age ago.
It must have been summer.

Midges hover above your head
as you crawl, on a teenage hunt,

into the shed smothered with briars
and privet gone wild.

Rods of light from gaps in the galvanise
soften the darkness, their tail-chasing

shadows skim layers of dusty cobwebs
clinging to the walls, the boarded-up windows.

You like this kind of place. The sense
of the unknown. Never knowing

what you might find in the gloom,
what might be inside the rotting cupboard,

the door hanging off, inviting you in?
Nothing there but a withered butterfly

clinging to a corner, shelves lined
with newspapers. Nothing notable

until you see the date of your birth
on the front page of the Irish Independent.

You lift it as you would a fragment of papyrus
from an ancient tomb, with a message

just for you, and hurry away,
full of trepidation, elation and wonder.

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THE HAGGARD

In her sixteenth year, hemmed in
by summer heat, a privet hedge

grown wild, she weaves through stalks
of wild shrubs, weeds and insects.

Butterflies, bobbing from bloom
to bloom, and bees, head-butting

petals, stigma, style and ovary,
abandoned cars, a rusted plough

and a collapsed pigsty, barely visible
through the undergrowth.

Down in the dark a stream trickles,
high in winter, low in summer,

where frogspawn quivers in mud, shaded
by the slanted roof of the cowhouse,

four bays baked in cow dung,
the sloping floor dried of all slop.

On the edge of the galvanise roof
a crow shuffles, eyes darting side to side,

his deadly beak, sharp-shaped as a blade,
chest flickering indigo, lavender, copper.

This is where she comes to breathe
the scented air, lie down in the long grass

framing her like a Moses basket. Expectant
of something though she knows not what.

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THE VIOLET VENDOR & CHILDREN’S GAMES
(after Bruegel the Elder and Pelez)

The boy is slumped against a grey pillar,
a burnt umber wall, his face held up
to the light, corpse pale. Baby chest
>exposed beneath a half open jacket,
ripped at the elbow. Dead to the world.
One hand is caught on the edge
of a cheap wooden tray strung
around his neck. The tips of his fingers
on the other rest lightly on cold stone,
a spray of violets slipped from their grasp.
A healthy child, I’m sure his mother said
when he was born as she scanned
his high cheek bones, pert nose,
fine Egyptian shaped feet, now bare,
but blood still flowing to his toes.

Of what is he dreaming?
Fete day on the yellow ochre square,
the patches of grass where he and his friends
play leap-frog, climb well-spaced trees
on the river bank, ride horsey
on the fence,
ring-a-ring-a-rosy and girls spinning
like a whirling dervish. Portly elders
surveying the play, mother and father
with clasped hands and arms carrying
his little sister, while grandfather, above
in the window. holding the youngest;
looks out from sunken eyes on folk
who gamble their coins down near
the long table soon to be filled with pies
and puddings, pig heads and mutton.

In the scattered jigsaw way of dreams
he maps out the scene, piece by tiny piece.

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