The plan, such as it was, fitted on the back of a beer mat: buy a campervan, drive the Wild Atlantic Way from bottom to top, and paint every one of its fifteen official Signature Discovery Points before the money or the nerve ran out.
Jason O'Brien is forty-nine, freshly out of the classroom after twenty-two years teaching art in Dublin, and two winters into grief. The van — a thirty-year-old Volkswagen he names The Curragh — costs slightly more than it is worth, and is worth every penny. What happens over the next two months becomes The Painter's Road: three illustrated books, fifty original paintings, and the slow discovery that being alone is a skill you can learn like any other.
Book One: South by the Sea
South by the Sea runs from the harbour colours of Kinsale to the beehive huts of Slea Head — six Discovery Points, sixteen paintings, one scraped wing mirror at Charles Fort, and a publican in West Cork who feeds him chowder and gives his work the truest review it has ever received. It is the book of a man learning, chapter by chapter, how to travel alone in a good way.
Book Two: The Long Middle
The Long Middle picks up at Loop Head — where a squall breaks over the sea arch at George's Head just as Jason arrives to paint it — and carries on through the horseshoe bay at Kilkee, the Cliffs of Moher, Connemara and Kylemore's mirrored lake, to Achill's Keem Bay. Readers of this blog will know some of that coastline already: it is the same West Clare shore as our Kilkee guide and the Loop Head walk, and the same headlands hang in our print collection.
Book Three: North to the Edge
North to the Edge is the final leg: a flat tyre outside Bangor Erris that leads — via the sheep farmer who stops to help — to a hidden holy well he never would have found otherwise; Dún Briste standing alone in the Atlantic off Downpatrick Head; Yeats's grave under Ben Bulben; Slieve League's iron-red cliffs; and at last Banba's Crown at Malin Head, the fifteenth headland, where the road and the story both run out of Ireland to stand on.
What the books are
Each chapter closes with the original painting it produced — fifty full-colour plates across the three volumes, in oil, gouache and watercolour — so the series reads as much like a sketchbook of the Irish coast as a memoir. They are written for anyone who has driven the Wild Atlantic Way, is planning to, or wants to do it from an armchair with the rain safely on the far side of the window.
By F Cosgrove, all three books are available as full-colour paperbacks on Amazon — browse the series in The Painter's Road collection, and if a particular stretch of coast catches you, the same headlands are in our signed fine art prints.