A weekend Celebrating the Spring Equinox 2016 at Newgrange, Boyne Valley, County Meath, Ireland.
Happy Spring Equinox 2016 to everyone …..
Yesterday Marked the start of spring time, so over the weekend I spent sometime visiting both Newgrange and the Hill of Tara. Both perfect locations to gain a little understanding as to how our European pagan ancestors both recorded and celebrated the movement of the sun and universe they lived in.
It was exactly, one quarter of a year that had passed since the shortest day of the year, the day when at Newgrange the rising sun can be seen to travel all the way into the passage tomb at the centre of the monument.
The Spring equinox 2016 celebrating
Yesterday marked the arrival of spring, the date of the vernal equinox, or spring equinox as it is known in the northern hemisphere. Spring equinox. During an equinox, the Earth’s North and South poles are not tilted toward or away from the sun. (Ref :Wikipedia)
This means the sun will rise exactly in the east and travel through the sky for 12 hours before setting in the exactly west.An equinox happens twice a year around March 20 and September 22 when the Earth’s equator passes through the centre of the sun.
For those in the southern hemisphere, this time is the autumnal equinox that is taking people into their winter.
Druids and Pagans like to gather at Stonehenge early in the morning to mark the Spring Equinox, to see the sunrise above the stones.
The Pagans consider this is the time of the ancient Saxon goddess, Eostre, who stands for new beginnings and fertility. This is why she is symbolized by eggs (new life) and rabbits/hares (fertility). Her name is also where we get the female hormone, oestrogen.
From Eostre also come the names “Easter” and “Esther” the Queen of the Jews, heroine of the annual celebration of Purim which was held on March 15. At Easter, Christians rejoice over the resurrection of Jesus after his death, mimicking the rebirth of nature in spring after the long death of winter.
It is also a time to cleanse your immune system with natural remedies. In Wiltshire and other parts of rural Britain it used to be tradition to drink dandelion and burdock cordials as the herbs help to cleanse the blood and are a good tonic for the body after a harsh winter.
Newgrange a Gallery
St Patrick’s day a Landscape Gallery 2016
The Mountain of Slievenamon
County Tipperary
Ireland
Nigel Borrington
Happy St Patrick’s day everyone !!!!!
For the last few St Patrick’s day Holidays, I have posted some of my Landscape images from around Ireland , today I want to do the same as I feel that for me today is about celebrating the great landscape’s Ireland has to offer and getting outside to enjoy the real Ireland that surrounds the people who have made it their home.
Ireland: a St, Patrick’s Landscape Gallery
My Name Is Gossip, A poem by : Oliya Charkhi
My Name Is Gossip
I am a mysterious phenomenon
I am a menace to the society and families
An element of devastation and destruction
People can’t fathom my destructive powers
I thrive on losing or questioning people’s sanity
I hurt without killing
I plant hatred and jealous in people’s heart
I break hearts and ruin lives
I am sly, cunning and malicious
And gather strength with age
The more I am quoted, the more I am believed
I flourish at every level of society
My victims are helpless
They cannot protect themselves against me,
For I have no name, no face
I sneak and sow the seed of doubt in the soil of innocent hearts
to extinguish their joy
I sometimes hide behind a smile,
Or simply behind an innocent tear
Most of the time, I creep and stab from behind
To track me down is impossible
The harder you try, the more elusive I become
I target the vulnerable or the hurt
I simply don’t let happiness chance
I am nobody’s friend
Once I tarnish a reputation it is never the same
The wound I inflict never heals
I overthrow governments and ruin marriages
I destroy careers and cause sleepless nights
I generate suspicion and grief
I make innocent people cry
My name hisses hate
Yes, my name is Gossip
Fridays Artist : Peter Collis, An Artist who Understands the Irish landscape
Glencrea Valley
by Peter Collis RHA
I started this week in my blog by saying that I was taking sometime each day to study some of my most loved Artists, I feel that the week has been really valuable to me in this respect and I am very pleased with how it has all worked out. At the same time the week has only scratched the surface of my full aims, being to gain an understanding of how so many great artists have used the landscape of Ireland and the UK in their art work and to define how I can take this as some personal inspiration.
While during the last few years I have taken many more photographs than produced paintings, I have been painting as a form of self-expression for many years. Oddly it was not until I decided to attend art school at Waterford(WIT) that I stopped painting so much, I think many experience this odd effect from current formal art study and art schools.
I don’t want my blog to become completely art and artists based and to move away from my own photography posts, although I personally feel that the two are very closely linked in any-case. So next week I will move a little back towards photographic images, I will however still keep posting some reviews of the artists and art work that I find the most interesting.
Has this week helped to inspired me ? , Absolutely! I feel its time to paint again as well as use my camera !!!
One of these very inspiring artists is Peter Collis the artist I have selected for my Friday Post. I remember visiting the Solomon Gallery, Dublin in 2002 , the first time I got to see any of peters paintings and I very much liked them from the start. I liked his style of painting of the landscapes he painted and very clearly loves, using a limited amount of colours like many artists do, I very much liked the way the movement of his brush can be so clearly viewed in his work, each gesture he made forms a feature in the landscapes he paints and each of these gestures are left alone on the canvas from the very moment they have been made.
I found this great review of Peter in the Irish independent dated 2012 – it says much more Than I can myself !!!
A little about Peter Collis by : Eamon Delaney
A lovely, gentle man’ was how veteran sculptor Imogen Stuart recalled the painter Peter Collis who has passed away at the age of 83. Collis, who was born in England and came to Ireland in 1969, was an acclaimed landscape artist and still life painter who had been a stalwart of the Royal Hibernian Academy. His canvasses are characterised by a powerful and dramatic style under the painterly influence of great masters such as Paul Cezanne, whom he adored, and Maurice de Vlaminck. In contrast to the traditional realistic depictions of the Irish countryside, Collis employed a bold brush and brought a strong expressive energy to his outdoor renderings.
He was particularly fond of Killiney, and its bay, and of the topsy turvy Wicklow countryside. The Sugar Loaf mountain became a familiar motif in his work. He also composed striking still lifes, of groups of green pears and vivid red apples, which evoked a distinctive European quality.
The physical appearance of Peter Collis often belied the rugged intensity of his work, with its rain-drenched hills and wind-bent trees. An unfailingly courteous man, who was widely popular, he wore Savile Row suits and was described by painter Mick O’Dea as possibly “the best dressed artist in the entire Irish arts scene”.
Born in London, he studied drawing and painting at the Epsom College of Art in London between 1949 and 1952. After college, he moved to Ireland where he had discovered a profound connect with the Irish landscape which would shape the course of his painting for the next four decades. Working for the Shell Oil company, Collis would paint in the early mornings from sketches and studies made on sales trips across the country, developing his craft and building a reputation as a painter of exquisite fluency. The critic Desmond McAvock wrote of him: “Like Cezanne he is really more interested in the structure of his scenes than in their transitory appearance . . . he can bind his observation into a cohesive, tightly controlled but always sensitive design.”
According to his longtime companion and fellow painter, John Coyle, Collis “saw things in the Irish countryside which the rest of us might never see”. Being something of an outsider, the Englishman was emboldened by bringing a fresh eye to it all. “He didn’t have the historical or territorial baggage that many Irish would have,” said Coyle, “and saw the landscape for what it was along with the physical, and poetic, possibilities it offered. He pursued the simplification and arrangement of shapes, just like Cezanne.”
In Dublin, Collis was most recently represented by the Solomon Gallery and only last month had a retrospective exhibition in the John Martin Gallery in London. In 1990, he was elected to full membership in the Royal Hibernian Academy and was actively involved in the activities of that body. In 2002 he was conferred a senior member of the Academy. He received many awards, including the Royal Trust Co. Lt. Award in 1975, the Maurice MacGonigal Landscape Prize of 1981 and the James Adam Salesroom Award, RHA of 1999. His paintings are represented in many public collections, including those of AIB, Bank of Ireland, Limerick University, University College Dublin, and the Office of Public Works. His paintings are also owned by many private collections including Bono, Christy Moore, and Lord Puttnam, the English film maker.
He will be missed by the artistic establishment, but also in the context of the wider artistic understanding of the Irish landscape, which he did so much to further. Most especially, of course, he will be missed by his wife Anne, and daughters, Vanessa, Mandy and Kate, as well as grandchildren. He was sadly predeceased by the untimely passing of two of his children, David and Gail. His funeral service was held in the Parish Church, Monkstown (Church of Ireland) followed by burial in Deansgrange cemetery.
Sunday Independent
Thursdays Artist is a rediscovered source of artistic energy : Joash Woodrow
Four Trees, White Fence by Woodrow, Joash (1927-2006);
I first viewed the brilliant art work of Joash Woodrow in 2005 at the Manchester Art Gallery, I was back in Manchester visiting my sister and went into the city centre for the afternoon. I was not intending to visit the Gallery but it was raining so I wondered inside to see what exhibitions where on display, this was a lucky moment and one I will never forget.
I looked around the galleries permanent exhibitions and then took the stairs to the upper floor for a guest exhibition entitled “Retrospective – Joash Woodrow”, from the very first painting I viewed, I just knew I was going to fall in love with Joash’s drawings and paintings and I have been fascinated with his work and life story ever since.
I love Joash’s work for its very honest style, by this I mean that I feel he used his brush’s and paint’s to capture his world as he found it, there is little to praises or note about how perfect his style of painting or drawing is but so much to fall in love with about how he viewed his surroundings and how well he liked and felt for the people he painted.
This is painting in the RAW, produced by someone who, I feel if you were allowed to get close to him then you would truly like him !!!
Joash Woodrow (1927-2006) Mr Woodrow’s Shop, Chapeltown Road, Leeds c
About Joash Woodrow, By :Nicholas Usherwood
Joash Woodrow, Reclusive painter whose work provides a significant link between British and European art
The chance discovery in a Harrogate bookshop in 2001, by the painter Christopher P Wood, of six volumes of an engraved Victorian art history, wildly and exuberantly annotated in a series of Picasso-esque drawings and collages by the then completely forgotten painter Joash Woodrow, led directly to the re-emergence of one of the most significant artistic figures in postwar British art. A visit a few days later by the Harrogate dealer Andrew Stewart to a small, semi-detached house in north Leeds, where Woodrow had lived alone for 20 years, uncovered an extraordinary story. The house was filled with some 750 canvases and around 4,000 works on paper, a lifetime’s achievement which a devoted family was none the less contemplating consigning to a skip.
Joash, who has died aged 78, had recently been taken into sheltered accommodation, having nearly set fire to the house, but his work itself had avoided serious damage. In the months that followed, it became apparent that this was no isolated figure at the margins of art history but an artist of sophisticated interests and training.
Born in Leeds, Woodrow was the seventh of nine children in a poor but cultured Jewish family that had escaped the pogroms in eastern Poland of the early 1900s. His father had run a Jewish bookshop in Chapeltown before working in Montague Burton’s factory to provide for a growing family. Joash trained at Leeds School of Art and, in 1950, won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art.
His intense shyness does not seem to have been suited to the competitive atmosphere there, though his tutors’ reports commented that his work already seemed more European in feeling than most of his contemporaries, among them John Bratby, Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach. A year or so after leaving the RCA in 1953, he suffered a nervous breakdown and took himself back to Leeds, where, supported financially by his family, he lived and worked for the rest of his life.
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Joash Woodrows – Leeds
With his mother and two brothers also living in the two-up, two-down house, working conditions must have been extremely cramped, which almost certainly explains the comparatively small scale of Woodrow’s early work. Mostly portraits and landscapes, their dark tones illumined by flashes of sonorous colour and intense solemnity, they reveal the beginning of a distinctive style, one that in its understanding of the French fauvist Georges Rouault showed Woodrow already looking to European art for inspiration.
This gathered momentum with a number of visits to the huge Picasso exhibition at the Tate in 1960, the crucial impact of which was to give Woodrow an insight into his Jewish heritage, and the understanding that the roots of his art lay outside this country and were essentially European in character.
Looking to the fierce expressionism of Karel Appel, Asger Jorn and the Cobra group, the harsh, raw surfaces of Jean Dubuffet and the Art Brut circle, and the insistence on the quality of mark-making of Nicolas de Staël and the tachistes, Woodrow began to uncover the source of those artistic energies that were to carry him over the next 30 years of intense activity. With the death of his mother in 1961 – and with more room in which to paint – there was a steady increase in the scale and ambition of the work.
A lack of success in the work he occasionally submitted to large, open competitions like the John Moores, however, encouraged a feeling of isolation, something his reclusiveness only served to emphasise. By the early 1970s, he was living and working with very little thought for anything but the next painting, producing large-scale canvases (anything of up to 5ft x 8ft) with quite extraordinary rapidity. When not painting, he was drawing furiously in the semi-industrial and urban districts of north Leeds those subjects that were to form the basis of some of the most original and experimental works of his later career.
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If his personal life was unhappy, there is no sign of it in the power and exuberance of the broad brush strokes, high-pitched colour and boldly flattened picture spaces with which he describes this landscape – an unprepossessing jumble of scruffy allotments, derelict factories and scattered trees.
Gilbert Looking Down, Joash Woodrow
By the early 1990s, Woodrow’s physical and mental health began to decline, and the house was too cluttered with paintings for him to do anything but draw. At the time of the 1999 fire, he seems to have stopped doing even that and, after his removal to sheltered accommodation in Manchester, he lost interest in working altogether.
Nor did he seem very interested in the public recognition that followed, when books and major exhibitions – at Leeds art gallery and then Manchester art gallery, and the Ben Uri and RCA last year – created a wave of interest that looks certain to place him firmly as a significant link between British and European artistic movements in the second half of the 20th century. His brothers Saul, John and Paul survive him.
· Joash Woodrow, artist, born April 7 1927; died February 15 2006
Irish national tree week 2016
This week in Ireland is National tree week, so I thought I would share some of the images that I have taken during my time living here in county Kilkenny.
Irish Trees, a Gallery
Tuesdays Artist – Bernadette Kiely
Bernadette Kiely. Gorse
I first came across the drawings and paintings of the county Kilkenny based artist Bernadette Kiely, while attending a two year art course at the Grennan mill craft school.
I liked Bernadette’s art work from the very first time I viewed it, I feel she captures completely the local landscape that surrounds us here in County Kilkenny. The county while not the most spectacular in Ireland varies a lot from low boggy lands and flooded river banks and mountain tops.
A little About, Bernadette Kiely
Bernadette Kiely was born in Carrick on Suir, County Tipperary and grew up beside the river Suir. She graduated from The College of Art and Design at Waterford Institute of Technology with a distinction in Graphic Design and worked in graphic design and architecture in New York and London before taking up painting full time in 1984. She attended the Slade School of Fine Art in London and has been working in her studio beside the river Nore in Thomastown, County Kilkenny since 1992. Her paintings and drawings are based on prolonged observation of specific landscape elements and are characterised by her attention to the close up worlds of bog cotton, gorse, mud, lichen and other natural phenomena including weather and atmospheric conditions on the river Nore and its environs. Bernadette Kiely is a member of Aosdana.
As with yesterday’s artist, I have linked to both web-site and to some on the painting I like the most …
A Monday look at Joseph McWilliams
Joseph McWilliams PPRUA
I am taking time this week to do a study of some landscape artists/photographers who’s work I very much like very much.
I feel the need to take a look at the work of the artists I know of again, who use the landscape of Ireland both North and South along with the British Isles, in there drawings and painting and Photographs.
I first came across the art work of Joseph McWilliams when I visited an exhibition called “Landscapes north and south”, the the exhibition was held at the Glebe House Gallery, County Donegal.
A little about : Joseph McWilliams PPRUA
Joe McWilliams was born in Belfast in 1938. He studied at the Belfast College of Art and at the Open University. Later he lectured in Art Education at the Ulster Polytechnic in Belfast and was Senior Lecturer and Senior Course Tutor at the University of Ulster. Since 1986 he and his wife, artist Catherine McWilliams have managed the Cave Hill Gallery, Belfast. He has had numerous solo exhibitions and has been represented in major Irish group shows both in Ireland and abroad; Recently his work was seen in an exhibition entitled ‘Dreams and Traditions: 300 Years of British and Irish Painting’ from the Ulster Museum Collection which toured the USA in conjunction with the Smithsonian Institute, Washington. His work is held in numerous collections including: NI Arts Council, Queen’s University, Coras Iompair Éireann, the Department of the Environment (NI), AIB, the National Self Portrait Collection of Ireland.
McWilliams is a regular lecturer and broadcaster on the Visual Arts in Northern Ireland and has been invited to speak on the Arts a number of times in Boston, USA. He has also published articles and reviews on the subject. He has written many scripts for BBC radio and has presented, his own script “The Way that I Went” which was seen on BBC world services as well as locally and in Britain. His own work has been exhibited at a variety of venues in Ireland, Britain, Europe and the USA. He is perhaps best known for his paintings of ‘The Troubles’ evidenced in exhibitions such as ‘Art for Society’ Whitechapel Gallery, London; ‘Documenta 6’ Kassel, W.Germany; ‘A Troubled Journey 1966-1989’ and ‘Colour on the March’ both at the Cavehill Gallery, Belfast.
I liked Joseph’s paintings very much for both their painting style and the fact that he used the world around himself for subjects to paint, even using his own back Garden for much of his work.
Here I link to his web page http://www.josephmcwilliams.com/, for some of the painting I like the most.
Kilkenny landscapes in March – Two Poems on March
Kilkenny Landscapes
Nigel Borrington
“The sun is brilliant in the sky but its warmth does not reach my face.
The breeze stirs the trees but leaves my hair unmoved.
The cooling rain will feed the grass but will not slake my thirst.
It is all inches away but further from me than my dreams.”
– M. Romeo LaFlamme, The First of March
The word ‘March’ comes from the Roman ‘Martius’. This was originally the first month of the Roman calendar and was named after Mars, the god of war. March was the beginning of our calendar year. We changed to the ‘New Style’ or ‘Gregorian calendar in 1752, and it is only since then when we the year began on 1st January. The Anglo-Saxons called the month Hlyd monath which means Stormy month, or Hraed monath which means Rugged month.
“Equal dark, equal light
Flow in Circle, deep insight
Blessed Be, Blessed Be
The transformation of energy!
So it flows, out it goes
Three-fold back it shall be
Blessed Be, Blessed Be
The transformation of energy!”
– Night An’Fey, Transformation of Energy
Sketches of Ireland , kilcooley Abbey, County Tipperary
Sketches of Ireland
Kilcooley Abbey
Tipperary
Nigel Borrington
Last week I revisited Kilcooley Abbey in country Tipperary with the aim of capturing some images to produce some sketches and paintings from.
The Abbey is an amazing location and this quick sketch is made on my tablet using Krita a digital painting application. I like the idea of fast sketches, they are not meant to be anything like finished work but by doing them you feel you know the location your hoping to work with very well, be it for painting/drawing or photography.
Irish landscapes – Kilkenny , an evening in early springtime
Irish Landscapes
Early Springtime
Kilkenny
Nigel Borrington
The last of today’s sunlight was just perfect ….
This evening I took a walk along some of our local lanes , up in the hills near the village of Windgap, Kilkenny. The sun hung low in the sky an hour before sunset and filled the fields with vivid greens and long shadows from the hedgerow trees, just such a wonderful sense of early springtime which is just around the corner now, you can feel it just waiting to burst through…..
This is the best time of year with so many great months ahead of us ……
Painted Skys – MyPaint
Painting Skys – MyPaint
Earlier this week I posted about MyPaint a Windows and Linux application used to produce ( Art work , digital Paintings and Graphic Designs)
Since then I have been able to spend a little time using this application to paint some sky’s using some photographs as source material. I feel that its always a good idea to practice areas of a painting and sky’s are great fun to work on by themselves.
MyPaint has a full selection of artists brushes available that are capable of reproducing such painting styles as (oil, Acrilic and watercolour), I have found the watercolour brushes and tools such as the sponge very flexible, especially when you want to blend areas of a painting together and produce some soft area.
Another area I have worked with is the colour palettes, there are many great palettes available as standard in MyPaint, I am however more use to working with artist colours from a tube and wanted to recreate some of these colours digitally.
So by downloading the Winsor & Newton Artists colours palette as a tiff file and then creating my own palette by using the colour eye proper selection tool and the tiff file I have now produced a palette that matches the one I am a little more use to working with. This palette is only a starting point and I can ether edit or added to it as needed.
As for mixing colours using this palette as a starting point, I am experimenting with the available scratch pad window along with the palette knife and smudge tools to see just how well colours can be mixed.
When President Kennedy visited Ireland in 1963 – Kennedy Homestead, Co.Wexford
Kennedy Homestead
Co, Wexford
Nigel Borrington
This very modest and humble farm yard and surrounding buildings, Located at ( Dunganstown, New Ross, Co. Wexford, Ireland ) is the birthplace of President John F. Kennedy’s great-grandfather Patrick Kennedy.
So it was that back in June 1963, the President of the USA decided that it was high time to take a visit to his grandfathers home. The Presidents visit to Ireland included these very key moments, in the visit to the family Homestead, drinking a cup of tea and enjoying some sandwiches with his Irish cousins.
In the years that followed his visit the family home has been turned into an equally modest but great exhibition centre, with a new building that contains many great photos and films relating to JFK and his family history.
It is hard to escape the ironic fact that while this was a very successful attempt to catch up with his own family and its history, by taking a few moments here – that he himself described as “The best moments of his life”, the visit took place only weeks before his own death in Dallas on the 22nd of November 1963.
His parting words to his Irish cousins, related to the fact that he understood very well that they may have found it very disruptive, the worlds media arriving in their small farm yard, so while he made a promised to revisit, he also promised that it would only be every ten years or so, clearly however this was to be his first and very last visit with them ……
Gallery
Digital painting and artwork with mydraw
During the weekend, I started to use an application called (my-paint), to help with some of the art work that I am starting to work on again.
I first used this application last year and along with a Wacom tablet , I have its great fun to work with.
I love the drawing control the tablet can give, almost as good as using a real pencil or brush and this combined with the pens and brushes available in my-paint, you can make a great start learning line control and layering of both tone and colour.
County Kilkenny, Landscapes images from a cycle
Cycling Kilkenny
As the new year began in full, I made the decision to get my cycle back on the road for 2016, I have owned this bike for about 18 years and during that time made some great use of it. Over the last few years however I had been using it less and less, so I guess its time to start some new adventures on it.
I finished getting everything back to a good condition, with a service about two weeks ago and have been taking local trips as often as possible during January.
I feel already that it is great to be out on the open road and its good to be able to just stop where you like and take out the camera to get some images, no need for finding a place to park up and you can stop the moment you see something, anything, you want a picture of.
Spring in January ?
Spring In January ?
This Morning when I opened our blinds I noticed our first Flowers of Spring but In January ?
The weather this winter has been very wet and warm and many people have been saying they have spring flowers already, these are the first in our own garden.
January and some thoughts about Molly
January , Thoughts on Molly
Molly was our much loved friend and companion for over twelve years, she featured many times here and visited most if not all of the locations that I have posted about.
She sadly passed away at the start of December but she had a great life with a walk everyday and she must have visited Ireland from the top to the bottom of the island during her time.
The places she loved the most always had water for her to swim in, as she loved fetching stones and sticks from the bottom of rivers, bringing them back as a present> she could stay doing this all day if we at some point did not want to move on.
Here I just wanted to share two of the many images I have of her , looking very please with the moments she was enjoying 🙂
A January walk along the Hedgerow
January in the Hedgerow
Nigel Borrington
January can seem so quite in the Irish Hedgerows, very little is moving or growing, yet there is still signs of life to be found in the remains of last years summer season.
I took these images at lunch-time while out on a walk, I feel that there is still much to see and capture, even so long after these flowers would have been at their colourful best …..
A reminder of the cycle of life …….
Life along the river Tiber , Rome
Life along the river bank
River Tiber
Rome
Nigel Borrington
I have often wondered what life would be like living on a house boat ?
This House boat is located on the river Tiber in Rome and just by taking a quick look at the image, you can see exactly the life style that its owner much have.
For example you can see the way they get to work by bicycle using the cycle path that runs the full length of the river as it winds its way through the city.
My Morning thoughts on Molly
Molly on a walk around the base of Slievenamon on the 20/11/2015
As many friends here know over the last three years I have been using my blog pages to share my Landscape photos, I am not sure if people realize that these posts were always more about shared walks for me and Molly our female golden retriever, deep into the Irish landscape and then using photos to recording these adventures , she was not always in every post or in all the landscape photos but she was always there alongside me.
This leaves a great legacy to Molly who sadly died peacefully last weekend, she was there with me for well over 1000 blog posts going back many years , this is however going to make the next few weeks and months so very hard in many ways, when returning to these places without her and I am a lot worried that as such my life has changed so much overnight.
I had a feeling after my last post yesterday that it could be taken as a goodbye to Molly but that could never be because she was with me for 12 years everyday and as such a goodbye would be simply impossible anyway!!!.
I see these moments and days into the future much more as a transition for her and me – YES!!! its a huge one but it was always going to be !!!.
She will always be with me and I can and have to find a way of embracing that !!!!
I have to grasp what has happened because I have to keep doing all the things we did together, the walks and all the visits to so many if not all the locations that I love around me, just like she did !!!
At the moment I am finding it almost impossible to go to any of these places, so I am house bound, I know sooner rather than later I have to get out and walking again otherwise my entire life has change to much!!
I found this great web page last night on these exact feeling I am having,
“Given the intense bond most of us share with our animals, it’s natural to feel devastated by feelings of grief and sadness when a pet dies. While some people may not understand the depth of feeling you had for your pet, you should never feel guilty or ashamed about grieving for an animal friend. Instead, use these healthy ways to cope with the loss, comfort yourself and others, and begin the process” More….
and gave it a good read, its very good as are so many pages of this topic 🙂
The experience of molly’s death at the weekend was peaceful for her but traumatic to be very honest for us, we were fully involved with her life right to the very last second of it and I am so pleased with this being the case, but OMG it’s hard in these days and hours since then !!!
The picture above was taken only on the 20/11/2015 and as you can see she was very healthy, slower with her age but for her age she was very good.
I do have that fact to hold on to.
I want to share these thoughts here because like I say Molly always had a massive place here over the years and she still does, its going to be very hard to work-out how to deal with her involvement into the future, I do however feel that she has one as I could not step out of the door at the moment with my camera, without feeling she is still here with me !!!
I love the Irish landscape so much though , so this blog does not stop here !!!!!!
A post just For you MOLLY !!!!
To Molly our Pal and great Friend
Molly, So many memories
Over the time of my blog, I have posted many times about Molly our Pal and great Friend for the last twelve and a half years. A great girl and much loved doggy.
Sadly she very peacefully left our sides on Saturday the 5th Dec.
She had a wonderful life with us and we had a very enriched life because of her. She loved and lived every moment sharing and giving so much back to us and to all who met her and those she loved.
While we are heartbroken,we do know that she’s been a real gift. From puppy to old lady, she has been a joy. We miss her already so very much.
We all miss you Molly, and love you too great girl.
Happy Thanks giving to everyone …….
Have a great Thanks giving!!
Personally I am most grateful this year for all the changes I have had time to notice in the landscape that surrounds our home here in Ireland 🙂 🙂
– Carol L. Riser, Autumn
“When the trees their summer splendour
Change to raiment red and gold,
When the summer moon turns mellow,
And the nights are getting cold;
When the squirrels hide their acorns,
And the woodchucks disappear;
Then we know that it is autumn,
Loveliest season of the year.”
Irish Landscape Gallery
Nigel Borrington 
New-grange and the Triple spiral
Boyne Valley, County Meath, Ireland
Nigel Borrington
The Tri-Spiral
Is a design engraved on one of the stones inside the middle chamber of Newgrange is probably the most famous Irish Megalithic symbol.
It is often referred to as a Celtic design, but it was carved at least 2500 years before the Celts reached Ireland. At 12 inches in diameter the tri-spiral design is relatively small in size, less than one-third the size of the tri-spiral design on the entrance stone.
Believed by many people to be an ancient symbol of pre-Celtic and Celtic beliefs, the triple spiral appears in various forms in pre-Celtic and Celtic art, with the earliest examples having been carved on pre-Celtic stone monuments, and later examples found in the Celtic Christian illuminated manuscripts of Insular art. The triple spiral was possibly the precursor to the later triskele design found in the manuscripts.
The megalithic tomb of Newgrange in Ireland features several examples of the triple spiral as petroglyphs. These particular examples do not feature three-fold symmetry of later renderings but feature two intertwined spirals with the third originating from the indentation between the other two. This particular feature is rendered with high fidelity in each instance at Newgrange and would suggest a non-tripartite interpretation. One possible interpretation could be the union of male and female (the two entwined spirals) to engender an offspring though how this relates to its setting in a tomb begs explanation.
Last night in order to highlight the uniqueness of the Newgrange spirals, I produced the following versions by tracing over a photograph I took of the original, thus producing different drawings using both the positive an negative spaces of the relief.
You can read into these your own interpretation of the original meaning ….
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March 24, 2016 | Categories: Comment, Gallery, irish history, megalithic people and remains, Nigel Borrington, Pagan, Travel Locations | Tags: County Meath, European history, Ireland, Newgrange, Nigel Borrington, Pagan, Pagan art, Pagan symbols, passage tomb, Tri Spiral, triple spiral | 2 Comments