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“Morning Light and Cottage, County Clare,” pastel by Pat Fryklund. |
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“Dromberg Stone Circle, County Cork,” watercolor by Pat Fryklund. |
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Eyes on Eire
By Sue Harrison
Banner Staff
When artist Pat Fryklund starts to work on one of her landscapes, she looks for more than a pleasing vista — she wants to find and capture the human influence on that landscape. And in her ancestral home of Ireland, she finds plenty to paint.
Her Ireland-inspired pastels and watercolors will be shown at the Wellfleet Senior Center, 715 Old King’s Way, Wellfleet. There is an artist reception from 3 to 5 p.m. Sunday with Irish music and refreshments. The show continues through March.
One thing that jumped up at her during her last Irish sojourn was the sheer number and variety of walls. There are so-called “burren walls” everywhere. Many of those came about because the English pushed the native Irish off the good farming land and into areas that were filled with large stones and hard to cultivate. Those stones were gathered and used in the burren walls, walls that now look picturesque but are a less than pretty reminder of the past.
“There are walls everywhere,” she says. “There are the famine walls, so named because during the famines the only work the people could get was building stone walls on the big estates. The top course was formed from jagged rocks like early barbed wire.”
And the stones appear in a more spiritual context as well, she says. “All over Ireland there is evidence of megalithic monuments (standing stones like the familiar Stonehenge site). They are everywhere.”
She captured one of the sites in her watercolor “Dromberg Stone Circle, County Cork.”
Fryklund switches back and forth between pastels and watercolor, letting her mood and the subject dictate which medium she chooses. “I go on watercolor jags,” she says. “I eat, breathe, sleep and dream in watercolor for weeks. I even dream about mixing the colors.”
She says she’s drawn to paint Ireland in watercolor. “It’s such a watery place, all the mist, the great gray thunderclouds, but also brilliant color. The light is special, like here. There aren’t a lot of trees but you get long mountain views. It’s very dramatic with the tall mountains and the corkscrew roads.”
Her arts career started after her kids were nearly grown. She had always been artistic and had found jobs that let her express her creativity, but making art didn’t take center stage until about a decade ago. After an adult ed class in pastels at Nauset, she started to paint and show in 1994. The beauty of pastels, she says, is that they are always there ready for you at a moment’s notice. Nothing to mix or dry out. Just open the box and there they are.
But she usually doesn’t paint on location. When she travels she sometimes makes sketches but more often takes photos and paints when she returns home to Wellfleet. She used to take her pastels and watercolors with her but says she wound up feeling guilty for not stopping and painting everything she saw. And, she adds, so much of what one sees in Ireland calls out to be painted.
“Every once in a while you feel like you are in a painting. The past and present become almost interchangeable. In Ireland you feel like you could blink and be in another age,” she says. “I’ve been there three times and there is enough to see to keep me coming back. One Irish guy said a perfect vacation would be spending two weeks in every county in Ireland.”
She’s ready to return and take in more long views of mountains, bogs filled with mystery and the occasional mummified body, chats with the easy-to-talk-to Irish folks, enigmatic standing stones and the ever-present cows.
“For a little place, it’s very big,” she says.
artseditor@provincetownbanner.com
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Local chorus sings for its supper
Outer Cape Gallery Listings
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Mar 6th, 2008