John O Grady Art-Dawn Across the Fields, morning, Ireland, green fields
Dawn Across the Fields, ©John O’Grady
19.6″ x 19.6″ x 1.25″, oil on deep edge panel, ready to hang.

NFS (Not for Sale)

As I was making this painting, the last line from the first stanza of Dylan Thomas’s wonderful ‘Fern Hill’ was on my mind:

“Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.”

This line evokes an image of a river of light flooding the land to banish darkness and its lingering mist for another day.

The result is a memory painting with a view from the Hill of Tara in the Irish midlands when light is on the cusp of spreading across the land.

The view point reminds me of another painting with a vast expanse of land ‘As Far as the Eye can See II’.

Though this time, the gently rolling landscape of the midlands is still partly shrouded in mist and the colours are cooler and quieter.

And, a point of precision. Although this viewpoint is looking west, the sun is also rising in the west. Poetic or artistic licence! Who said memory has to be reliable?

I’d love to hear what you think.