DIARY: Ruminations, Occasional thoughts & happenings - as they arise
Summertime Art - 25 July, Monday (Mood music? Sound on Quietly)
A month of good weather! Unbelievable - almost! Day after day of
sunshine.
It's enough to drive any computer enthusiast into the garden, buy a new garden
brolly, spruce up old sheds, and create some imaginative outdoor art.
That's exactly what happened in my case.
I left my dark little study and looked at the dreary blue painted sheds I had
endured for three years.
"It's too much!" I muttered to myself and went off to buy 5 litres of
exterior paint. Colour? Yellow seemed safest and brightest, and half way through
the operation, with an empty tin, I thought, "Dreary! Bland! I cant endure
it!" So off to the paint shop again, where I purchase a further 5
litres of white paint, thinking about white waves. It could look
like an ice-cream cone! It's a risk. But the sun shone and I was in
creative mood.
Yellow on its own could look too Protestant twee - like the new Catholic Church
across the road from me, where I join in the Eucharistic celebration most days.
I
suggested to my parish priest that shades of lime green would be cooler - more
elegant - but I doubt if he even mentioned it to the architect.
Laymen should mind their place - Fr Fleck appears to believe - i.e. suffer,
repent and be buried. The sooner the better in my case, I speculate, even though
in this instance whatever sense of colour and design I possess is confirmed by
an Education Degree - in Art & Design of all things!
But back to my rough, back garden art storm.
"Tell you what," I said to myself, "Why not liven up the old
walls with a mural, a cartoon? Maybe the gay face of a clown?"
(I
refuse to allow clever homosexual publicity to monopolise a fine, evocative word!)
"Nay! Not a masquerading clown! A real cartoon of me, as
seen by an old girlfriend. So this is how it turned out:
The gay old guy on the shed wall turned out to be Me! The real Mick O'Shea, fat, happy, fag in hand, raising a glass of wine, inspired by a cartoon that a lovely girl sent me. I reckon she got to the core of the guy that walks around masquerading as Mick.
Katie McGaw from Dungannon, fellow student at Dundee University with son Conor, seemed to agree.
She could not resist patting my lovely round tum!
Shortly after this we feasted on barbecued steak, salad and floury County Down
spuds, washed down by copious amounts of Chilean wine. Lovely stuff!
It was great to see them relaxing in the sun around my new, permanent objet d'arte - infinitely superior to Damien Hirst pickled sheep, Tracey Emin's unmade bed or an art gallery heap of bricks.
A visual delight is my garden art - and also capable of cooking steak and
sausages.
Some would call it a Barbecue.
Roll on the great weather - August still to come! Winter dreariness is months away!
Tuesday 26 July
Back
from Dungannon Conor prepared a simple Mexican meal for his Dad and himself -
chicken cooked in fiery Fajita spices, wrapped in floury tortillas and smothered
in mild salsa sauce, served outdoors..
Grand, tongue burning stuff, washed down - again - by red Chilean wine - with
flames leaping from my object d'art - transformed in seconds
from white charcoal burner to leaping fire in the dark. (My garden art really
is an ambidextrous little structure.)
It is a primitive, atavistic pleasure to watch the leap and flow of flames in
darkness.
Life, physical and spiritual, is conceived and maintained in fire..
