I rarely paint watercolours from life apart from the occasional still life, so it was unusual for me to tackle the subject of Dora, a neighbour's cat. She was having a snooze in our garden and I got five or ten minutes before she moved. It was nice to do something so quick and loose.
Here is a short BBC film, directed by Maeve O Cathain about my early books. Made in the mid-nineties, it features my work on The Snow Queen, Catkin and East of the Sun and West of the Moon. I was living and working in a basement apartment in Dublin at that time. The only heating was an open fire, and most of the smoke came into the living room, so that for the time I lived there I was always pretty unhealthy. I certainly look unhealthy in the film. My landlady was the writer Polly Devlin. She is an extra-ordinary, larger than life character. I came to know Polly's sister, Marie Heaney, and her husband the poet Seamus Heaney. Some years later I illustrated a book of Marie's Irish myths and legends, The Names Upon The Harp.
