Bog and Sky
Bog with Passing Cloud, ©John O’Grady, 2013
6″x 6″, oil on Panel

In Seamus Heaney’s poem “Bogland” his first verse is:

‘We have no prairies
To slice a big sun at evening –
Everywhere the eye concedes to
Encroaching horizon ,’

Maybe the closest we could come to a big sun sliced by the horizon line,
like on the American prairies, would be in the flatlands of the Midlands.

The Bog of Allen’s peat is intensively harvested by mechanical means to fire power stations.

Human hands have altered the landscape.  Some might think it’s bleak or barren.

I think it’s an extraordinary place where the flatness of the land combines with large swathes of chocolate
coloured bog stretches out before our eyes.

This painting is the result of these memories and emotions I associate with this land where large clouds
move across the landscape to play with light and shadows across the bog.

Let me know what you think.