That beautifully written volume had an immediate and dramatic effect on me and the walls of my primary school were soon covered with wildly coloured paintings inspired by the exploits of heroes and heroines whose names I already knew from younger days. Long before I reached my teens the obsession that has dominated the rest of my artistic life was strongly rooted in my imagination.

Tracing back to my early development as an artist brings me to another episode of my childhood which had a strongly formative influence on me. When my father left us to start up a new life in England, my mother was forced to sell up our house on the seafront of Skerries in North County Dublin and we went to live with relatives. A disastrous flooding left this new home permanently damp and chilly; as a result I contracted pleurisy and spent almost two years in a sanatorium. I was only ten years old so, being confined to bed for so long, I read and drew endlessly. I was given mostly American comics, but I also read so-called "Classic Comics" which were abridged illustrated versions of great novels. This literary diet was suplemented by the tales told to me by my mother and my great aunt, whom I used to call 'Granny'. I listened eagerly for hours on end to those "Fairy Stories". The tales told were always the same: tales of the 'old days', of the Tuath De Danann especially the stories of "the Children of Lir" and "Deirdre of the Sorrows"; of Cu Chulainn, the champion of Ulster and Finn MacCumhal, Leader of the Fianna; of Oisin and Niamh of the Golden Hair in Tir na nOg, the Land of Youth.

Childhood Memories - Page 1- Page 2


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