Kerry is the hardest county in Ireland to paint, and the reason is that it has already been painted too well and too often. Every view has a car park and a photograph attached to it. The difficulty is not finding something beautiful; it is finding something you have not already seen.
Four Kerry paintings from The Painter's Road are now available as prints.
The Skelligs, from Bray Head
Skellig Michael is normally painted up close: the steps, the beehive cells, the vertigo. From Bray Head on Valentia the two rocks are small, far out, and sitting on the horizon in open Atlantic — which is much closer to how anyone ever actually sees them. Monks climbed six hundred steps to live out there. At this distance the astonishing thing is not the monastery but the decision. See the print →
Moll's Gap
The road cuts through old red sandstone and then the whole of the MacGillycuddy's Reeks opens out in front of you. It is the view that stops every car on the Ring of Kerry, and it stops them because of the sequence: enclosed rock, then suddenly the entire range. Painting it means painting the width of the thing — letting the mountains run right out to both edges. See the print →
The Conor Pass
Ireland's highest mountain pass, and a road that anyone who has driven it remembers — single track in places, rock wall on one side, and on the other a drop to corrie lakes lying flat and dark far below. Buses are banned from it, which tells you most of what you need to know. The lakes are the subject really; the road is what gets you high enough to look down on them. See the print →
The beehive huts at Slea Head
Clocháns — dry-stone huts, corbelled inwards until they close at the top, no mortar anywhere in them. They have held the weather off this hillside for something like a thousand years, on the most exposed stretch of the Dingle Peninsula, with the Blaskets lying out beyond. Nothing about them is decorative. They are the shape they are because that shape survives, and they are still here, which settles the argument. See the print →
All four are plates from The Painter's Road. Prints are made to order on premium paper or canvas — browse the full collection.