At the Edge of Ireland (31 page)

Maybe a little too honest, I wondered. But Tim was a man of grace, charm—and good humor. His face lit up in a huge smile and his long blond hair shook as he chuckled. “Great! Then I can brainwash you without fear of you quoting snide critics' comments at me.”

“We are open books—scribble away upon our psyches!” I said.

So he did. We toured his remarkable home, admiring his airy studio and other spaces that seemed to appear as if by magic. Rooms flowed liquidlike into other rooms, and we had a sense of literally floating past large windows with dramatic images of Tim's cleft-and-jungle topography and white-painted walls filled with a vast array of his own vibrant oils and acrylics.

Then in the corner of his studio I noticed a John Cage quote written on an index card and pinned to the wall. It read: “I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones.”

Tim saw me reading the card. “That's great, isn't it…such a waste of possibilities and joys,” he said, “the joys of endless discoveries of all the amazing creative and other selves we possess. Why would anyone not want to reach out and grab them all! What was it Bob Dylan once said—something like ‘a real artist has to be in a constant state of becoming.' Great phase, that! Great reminder not to get too stuck!”

“Rachael told me you'd think something like that—and it reminds me of that other saying, can't think who said it: ‘Creation is born of passion and reshaped anew in passion,'” I said. “She seems to see you as a true restless Renaissance man pushing out the edges in so many different ways…”

“Ah, Rachael and Cormac. Great, great friends. And constant inspirations. And I need that. I've always had a dread of getting stuck in a rut. It's happened with some of my paintings. If I get into a new series and people enjoy them, then I'm offered these deadly commissions—you know, ‘Can you do me one just like that, but a…a little bluer to match my carpet!' If you're not careful you can become a sausage machine. Cormac fights the same battle with his ceramics.”

It was interesting to learn the coincidental parallels between Tim and Cormac. Both in their sixties, both living on Beara for over thirty years, both with prominent parents who gained fame and some notoriety from passionately pursuing their own unique lives. In the case of Tim, who was born in Dublin in 1946, his father was the noted businessman and art collector Sir Basil Goulding. “He was certainly what you might call a rather unorthodox figure,” said Tim. “On the one hand, a no-nonsense and nontraditional chairman of his own major business—he was also an avid and celebrated gardener, a great athlete, and a fanatical fast car driver. He and Valerie, my mother, gave me and my two brothers a wonderful upbringing by the River Dargle, which rolls out of the northern Wicklow Mountains. But—poor old Dad—he must have felt really let down when none of us wanted to take over the family firm. And especially with me—who kind of just disappeared into my own self-taught world of art and music. Although I think he would have sort of liked to live my kind of life—particularly the art part—so I guess I gave him a bit of a vicarious lift. Maybe!”

“What kind of music?” I asked.

“Oh, all kinds of weird stuff. I formed this group in the late 1960s—Dr. Strangely Strange. We had quite a bit of zany success for a couple of years. We still get together on occasion and create new stuff. I even did my own album in 2005—
Midnight Fry
. Remind me. I'll give you a copy. It's a real mishmash—a little bluesy, lots of dance-based loops, some great world-music-type multitracking. It's best listened to with top-class headphones—takes you to another level…another wacko planet! C'mon, I'll show you my recording studio…”

“You've got your own studio?” said Anne.

“Sure. I don't use it as much as I should—but it's great fun.”

Tim exuded a spirit of constant bemusement with himself, with everything around him, and the serendipity of the world in general. It was a contagious characteristic, and we found ourselves following him from surprise to surprise with permanent grins on our faces.

And there it was, another surprise, a small shed hidden atop a series of slippery, moss-coated steps up through the “jungle” and crammed with guitars, keyboards, speakers, and amplifiers, and a huge 140-track digital recording board.

“This looks like very serious stuff,” I said.

“Well—the art world has been good to me so…Oh, listen. Let me play you the first track of
Midnight Fry
—‘On the Fly.' See what you think.”

Within seconds the tiny recording “shed” was shaking with a rich multitracked cacophony of sound. It was like being inside a gigantic stadium speaker. Incessant bongo beats merged with staccato loops in eerie echoing Philip Glass–type synthesizer sounds followed by Ry Cooder–type slide guitar infills. Tim passed me the CD box and it read:

Recipe for Midnight Fry: Stunning vocals, ambient soundscapes, chill-out interludes, cutting edge samples—all prepared in a bowl of World and Celtic spices by Ireland's finest contemporary musicians.

“Can't argue with any of that!” I shouted to Tim over the screaming speakers. He laughed and handed me a new copy. “Try the rest at home.”

“And what's this other building higher up the garden?” asked Anne when the track ended and the little studio seemed eerily silent.

“Oh, that's another recent project, a special studio for Georgina. My wife. Well—second wife, actually. My first lives just down the road. We're still great friends. Georgina's into aromatherapy and ‘essences.' All rather mysterious at the moment—it's a new business—but it smells so lovely in there.”

“Any other building projects?” Anne asked.

“Well—I'm tempted to expand my art studio a little more, but I guess I'd just be getting a bit too greedy. My mother had a great philanthropist's spirit, so I get a little self-conscious about overly indulgent antics. She founded a clinic in Dublin for the physically disabled in the 1950s after that terrible polio epidemic. It's a huge operation now. Twenty-five hundred people. And she was a fabulous fund-raiser, always putting on concerts in our home and having these great overnight guests—people like Grace Kelly, Albert Einstein, Peter Ustinov, Orson Welles. On and on. I never knew who I'd see wandering around in pajamas or who'd be joining us for breakfast. I even got a private lesson from Henry Moore once when I was just starting to paint. He advised me how to tackle three pots standing on a windowsill. I kinda got into this semirealistic, semiabstract, straddling-the-fence kind of mode. A way to express and appreciate a single image in different ways simultaneously, and it sort of stuck. One of my earliest series was
Earth Fire
. Very intense dramatic canvases inspired by the colors and ferocity of our ritual gorse burning in the fields and on the moors every year. C'mon, I'll show you some of my stuff back in the house.”

And what a show it turned out to be. The gorse-burning works seemed to possess almost demonic energy as huge scarlet flames writhed up from the black earth into a black sky. Others portrayed the powerfully bold and broken landscape around the Allihies hills and the old tin mines. “There's so much inspiration right here—in this fantastic place. Huge rock massings, vast ocean and skyscapes, islands, pounding storms, platinum sunsets, the wild loneliness of the moors. Then you come right down to the fantastic miniature worlds of lichen patterns on worn strata, the primordial darkness of the old mining tunnels, the timelessness of our standing stones, circles and souterrains—it's all pure magic. And always with that underlayer of mystery…that sense that there's so much more to see and understand. I mean, I've learned so much since 1969 when I bought this clapped-out cottage for virtually pennies, but there's so much more now, so much…”

“But after all that time can you still see all this?” asked Anne, pointing to the vast vista outside one of Tim's huge picture windows.

“Oh, yes! Oh, my God, yes! I mean, there are times when familiarity can drift in like a fog, but it soon lifts—burns off—and it's all fresh and full of meaning again. It's not all positive, though—the reality of this hard place. I mean if I wrote what I know—truly know—about Beara or even just this one tiny part, I don't think I'd be able to live here anymore. There are still feuds and vendettas here going back decades—centuries! Depression is a scourge too, and the occasional suicide. Deirdre Purcell caught some of that in her famous book
Falling for a Dancer
. They filmed that for TV just over the top in Eyeries village. If you go to Caskey's pub, you'll see photos of the production. And Deirdre's such a fine person. Lives some of the year just outside Eyeries on the Kenmare road. She's a great lover of Beara—told me once she thought it was ‘one of the last places in Europe where everything is possible—and in a very relaxed and mellow way.' I like that idea. It reminded me of the old man who lived in that tiny stone cottage just down the cliff here. He had this magnificent view over Allihies and the whole bay and out to the Skelligs and he'd spend hours on an old chair by his door, sheltered from the winds. He'd just sit and look and sit and look…closest thing to a true Zen monk we had on this tiny corner of the peninsula, although he'd have no idea what a Zen monk was! I think his silence and utter peace inspired me—and it sort of crept into some of my work…”

“But not into your music, I don't think!” I said. My ears were still ringing from the traumatic barrage of Tim's music mix in the studio.

He laughed. “No, I guess not. That's another universe. It was a collective thing. Everyone wanted to be on the tracks, and there were over twenty-six musicians involved at one time or another. In fact I have a guy coming over tomorrow night—a wandering monk—he plays the Apache flute. Made from cedar—very unique sound. He's laying down a track for a new piece I'm pulling together—stop by if you want. Oh, and while I'm thinking, don't forget that just down the road toward Eyeries you've got Leanne O'Sullivan, one of Ireland's very best young poets. Beautiful girl. You both should meet her. And then there's John Kingerlee farther on. House near Deirdre Purcell's place. Has a reputation for…shall we say…bluntness, but he's a very talented guy. I'll call them if you like. Let them know you're floating about…”

 

A
ND SO WE FLOATED
about—buoyed by the spirit of great active creativity on this amazing little hideaway peninsula.

And Leanne was, indeed, a beautiful young woman. We found her a few days later at her family home overlooking Eyeries and the great mountain mass of Carrauntuohill rising high over Macgillycuddy's Reeks and the Ring of Kerry. At that first meeting it was the colors I remember most of all. The bright lemon of the O'Sullivans' large house, the vibrant intensity of the green fields dropping down the long, slow slope of the land from brittle ridge summits to the surfy reefs and bays of the coast. Then came the almost red-golden richness of Leanne's long hair, her soft but intensely luminous blue-green eyes, sprays of ginger freckles on her face and arms, and her pale, almost translucent skin. Dante Gabriel Rossetti or John Millais would have whisked her off to their pre-Raphaelite studios in the mid-1800s and immortalized her in one of their highly mannered, laconically moody, meticulously detailed masterworks. (I merely managed a scribbled sketch.)

Leanne O'Sullivan

Today, while only in her early twenties, Leanne has become accustomed to her celebrity as a gifted young Irish poet. “It began so early on, I couldn't really get serious about it. I was only a child when the English teacher brought this well-known Cork poet, Thomas MacCarthy, to our class. He read some of his works and then asked if anyone would like to share one of their own poems. And there was this deathly hush. Everyone sitting there like stone statues, hoping they wouldn't be picked out. So the teacher turned to me, and I could have fainted. But I'd been writing quite a few poems around that time, so I got up—knees all quivery—and recited one. And it seemed to go down all right. The class gave me a bit of applause, and then Mr. MacCarthy was very sweet and asked, ‘Did y' ever think about gettin' y'self published?' I sort of looked at him like he might be a little crazy and I said, ‘I'm only twelve!'

“But I guess the idea stuck—the idea of getting some of the poems published. Much later I got involved with Sue Booth-Forbes at Anam Cara—her center for writers and artists just down the hill from here. She's a beautiful altruistic person—a real creative catalyst—always helping others. My mum—Maureen—works with her, organizing workshops and special events. I'll be doing a reading there in a couple of weeks—come if you both have time. Sue would love that. Anyway, I was only sixteen or so and working on new poetry and I got one published in
Poetry
. Then I started entering all these various regional and national competitions and winning quite a few awards. Part of me couldn't take it all in. Things were happening too fast, and I was still just this skinny teenaager. In fact, I was very skinny—actually anorexic. So—well…here…this is a copy of my first book published a couple of years ago when I was twenty-one. It sort of gives you an idea of where I was at that very strange time…”