Ireland 2012

A Thousand Welcomes

I half-expected it to have faded, like a mirage, but here it was, the breathtaking views of the rugged coastline, the mist rolling in off the sea, the sheep maure lodging itself into the cracks in the soles of my shoes. Heaven? No, I don't believe in Heaven. It was home. -- Celtic Knot

When I wrote those lines about returning to the west coast of Ireland, I was speaking as the main character, but might as well have been speaking about myself. The image seen here is a photo I took from the top of Connor Pass, looking over An Danegean with the Ring of Kerry in the distance, and every time I go back to the Dingle Peninsula, I feel as if I can breathe again. Happy Saint Patrick's Day, and Slainte!

Your Opinion, Please

As creative team advisor for Bouler Architecture, I'm working on new ideas to reach more people. I confess, my Facebook page is a quiet affair. As my sister, Jenn Palumbo, puts it, it's like I'm in the witness protection agency. But I was really excited to hear that one of my longtime favorite blogs is taking advertising. Ciao, Chessa is the blog identity of the very talented photographer Monica Shulman. Her work, taken from travels around the world and her own back yard of NYC, has great range. It is beautiful without being sweet, relying on a complexity of light and dark, composition and spontaneity that leads me to follow her blog daily-- just to get my new art fix and once to pick up a gift for my father.

So where do you come in, you ask? Please tell me which image you prefer as a digital button representing this blog and Bouler Architecture. I have a feeling but will keep my mouth shut.

Exhibit A: House in Flight was created as a photoshop collage at first. I scanned the actual butterfly and cut up pictures of houses from a trip to Montpelier, VT. I painted the image with a magnifying lamp and size 1 brushes, and it was the promotional card for my December show at Ripe Art Gallery. It now hangs in the chic and elegant household of Modernemama, surrounded by three other pieces of mine.

Exhibit B: Two if By Sea is a mixed media collage that I created for Ripe Art Gallery's upcoming Valentine's Day Show, which opens, when else, Valentine's Day. It uses an old painting of mine of the Blasket Islands in Ireland. I had been studying the islands as part of my YA novel Celtic Cross. Considering the isolation this seafaring community faced, there were many poets who came from that dying culture. We have tried to get to the islands on four different trips over, but alas the tides never cooperated. So I cut up my painting of the Blaskets into a diptych. Then I scanned our 19C German biology illustrations from an antique store in New Orleans (go Saints!) and photographed our place, Potic Cottage, where Jim designed a modern addition to a basic 600 square foot ranch. The string is scanned from a shopping bag in my office.

By the way, I'm also thinking of having reusable shopping bags made from the image, but cost may be prohibitive.

So what do you think? Which one works better as an ad-- graphics/content?

Celtic Tiger

Having had many students participate in my writing process proved invaluable. My first YA novel, Celtic Tiger, is about Johnny O'Shea, a disenfranchised dropout from Queens, who, after losing his mother to a life of drugs and murder, finds connectedness with his great-uncle on the west coast of Ireland. It leads him to solve the mystery of his mother's death.

Though the novel is yet to be published, its had a healthy share of teen readers who generously offered insights into how they related to a character like Johnny O'Shea. Email me for the complete PDF if you would like to download it for free.

For the Love of Color

Brace yourself-- Shocking revelations today in the New York Times: The Guggenheim was supposed to be red!
That Platonic white ideal of modernism-- shattered. Our expectations of modern architecture do not include color. Instead we like to think in terms of the purity of the materials, sometimes losing out on the playfulness of color. For example, check out Friedensreich Hundertwasser's hostel for the Ronald McDonald House for convalescing children. The cheery, fanciful color must help lift spirits in such dire circumstances. Even the Victorian era, despite its prudishness, or perhaps because of it, used color in bold ways, expressing the architectural details with flair. And what a joy it is to see all of the lovely colorful buildings standing side by side like a pack of crayons in the small towns of Ireland. But color can be a commitment, and fear of choosing the wrong color can lead one to go the safe route: beige. One way to kill some time and test out color schemes is to go on the Benjamin Moore website. Their exterior options are fun to configure and before we painted our house in Islip, I tested many different combinations. Ultimately, we settled on no less than four different colors-- the overall house a customized blue that I fear we can never duplicate, periwinkle shutters, cranberry trim, and taupe accents. Now that we are looking at repainting Potic cottage with its new addition, I am anxious to test out some new ideas-- perhaps we'll have a vote?

The Dingle Way

In celebration of St. Patrick's Day today, I wanted to raise a pint to honor Ireland. I've learned a lot from my trips to the Dingle Peninsula, so much so that I set three of my four YA novels there. What is it about the air along the cliffs that makes me feel as if I am breathing for the first time?
On our first trip, James and I spent a good portion of a morning trying to find the Dingle Way, a marked trail which traverses the entire peninsula. After driving the sub-compact down every dirt path in search of the Dingle Way, even having our bumper attacked by two rowdy border collies, we gave up. To our left was an awe-inspiring cliff with a sheer drop down to the Atlantic Ocean. Seeing it, I knew I had to climb that peak, so we parked the car and headed up. The wind, the mist, the sheep manure, and finally the payoff: a view that nearly made me weep. On our way back to the car, James noticed a sign to our right-- the marker for the Dingle Way. We laughed and decided that what we had just done, creating our own path, was truly the Dingle Way. Slainte!