South by the Sea

Kinsale to Dingle — Book One of The Painter's Road

At forty-nine, freshly out of the classroom and two winters into grief, Dublin art teacher Jason O'Brien buys a thirty-year-old Volkswagen campervan he names The Curragh and sets off to drive the length of Ireland's Wild Atlantic Way alone, painting every one of its fifteen official Signature Discovery Points along the way.

South by the Sea is Book One of that journey — from the harbour colours of Kinsale to the beehive huts of Slea Head, by way of a scraped wing mirror at Charles Fort, a hidden lake found only by taking a wrong turn near Goleen, and the cable car to Dursey Island. Along the road he meets a publican who feeds him chowder and the truest review his work has ever received, a farmer who forgives a dented gate, and two German cyclists he will keep running into for the rest of the trip.

Each chapter closes with the original painting it inspired — sixteen full-colour plates of Charles Fort, Mizen Head, the Skelligs seen from Bray Head, Valentia's slate quarry and more — making this as much a small illustrated sketchbook of the Irish coast as it is a memoir of a man teaching himself, slowly, how to be alone in a good way.

Inside this book: six Signature Discovery Points from Old Head of Kinsale to the Conor Pass, sixteen full-colour original paintings and watercolours, and a first-time campervan traveller's honest account of wrong turns, small triumphs and the kindness of strangers in West Cork and Kerry.

By F Cosgrove. Available as a full-colour 8.5″×11″ paperback on Amazon. 108 pages.