Not right yet after last week. I mentioned in a previous post that I was going to Sligo to adjudicate at the Sligo Feis Ceoil. The standard was high but it was a punishing schedule. Three 12-hour days, give or take. Really didn’t know my own name at the end of it. Still pretty washed out.
The feis event that caused me to wake up in the middle of the night was the Seamus Heaney competition. Each competitor had to choose two poems from the anthology, 100 Poems, compiled by Heaney’s family after his death, introduce and perform them. The stressy element was that the winner would be obliged to perform one of the poems at the awards ceremony on Wednesday night in front of Marie Heaney, Seamus’s widow and Catherine Heaney, his daughter. My job was to select the person who would do this and hope that he or she didn’t make a bags of it!
In the end, there was a clear winner: a young woman who introduced the poems beautifully and recited her chosen poems with exquisite skill. Later, at the ceremony, the poor woman was shaking like a leaf as she was presented with her prize by Catherine Heaney. But, to be fair to her, she then pulled it together and performed The Skylight just right. I have to confess, I was very moved.
The feis schedule really didn’t allow any head space for art. Anyway, that’s just the way it was and there wasn’t much I could do about that.
This evening, I’ve been messing with pebbles, drawing on a few and varnishing some of my older ones.
A few fish …
A new mandala …
I had this idea about creating a jellyfish. I’m thinking of hanging it from a ceiling somewhere and I want it to look floaty and for the trailing fronds to move with any drafts. So I created a frame or armature for the jellyfish body out of some craft wire I bought ages ago in Flying Tiger. And then I lined the inside of it with some tissue paper.
I think the next stage should be making and attaching the fronds to the inside of the body. Tropical jellyfish have a mix of thick frilly fronds and thread-like ones. I haven’t quite worked out how I’m going to make the frilly ones. I’ll sleep on it.
We’ve been watching Anne with an E on Netflix, an interpretation of Anne of Green Gables. Anne is played by a young woman from Letterkenny, Amybeth McNulty. She’s excellent. The first episode was a real tear-jerker. For someone who cries at advertisements and who can’t get through the opening credits of the Sound of Music without blubbing, I didn’t stand a chance.