Many thanks to Steve Richardson for this in situ photo of my Hell on Earth poster advertising the Irish Examiner. This one was in Tipperary. I think the setting, on a shabby wall in a typical small Irish town is a particularly apposite for this image. I can't help wondering what local folk on their way to mass might make of the poster.
I've been busy moving studio, and also moving house, so I have neglected the blog a bit. Sorry. Here is another original I found during the moving process.
This picture illustrates a changeling story that was to be included in that anthology of Irish Fairy Tales that I was planning a number of years ago. I have always though this to be a most sinister Irish tradition, and I am convinced that over the centuries the notion of a fairy being substituted for a healthy child was used as an excuse to do away with many sickly or malformed babies. I can recommend a fascinating book by Angela Bourke called The Burning of Bridget Cleary for anyone with an interest in the subject.
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.
