harry clarke queen mab lithograph phoenix fine art

Here are the outsiders of society, the poor, the sick, gathered around Maculind. This was appropriate for the window I’d read about, Clarke’s Memorial Lancet of St Maculind (1924), the saint from whom the church takes its name, one in which his famous motif of darkness and light is clear. I went to Lusk on a day with gale force winds, sprawling showers interspersed with May sunshine. I hadn’t hoped to find two churches within five kilometres, both with Harry Clarke originals – one in Lusk, and one in Balbriggan, Co Dublin.ĭetail of Bowl of Blossoms from four decorative windows (1928) I scanned the index, curious as to where other windows might be located, places that might open again in June, July, August.

I wanted to see how Clarke’s colours might develop this way – it felt fitting for the subject of light through glass. When I feel stuck, taking pictures is nourishing I love analogue photography, its mortality, how colour can bleed and blur, most of all the element of chance. I was reading again, if only in tiny sustaining morsels: since Clarke’s panels told a story, perhaps if I couldn’t write, I would take pictures. I looked at Clarke’s exquisite imagining of Keats’s famous poem, then migrated from the book to the old laptop, looking up half-forgotten stanzas, remembering my melodramatic teenage self. One of his most celebrated pieces, The Eve of St Agnes, is in The Hugh Lane, now illuminating a quiet and unobserved gallery. The intensity and intricacy of flowers brought me Rosetti’s poem, A Birthday, yet alongside this was a sense of the uncanny Clarke’s depictions have something of the fairy tale, the old kind where there is something malevolent in a pair of red dancing shoes.ĭetail from the widow’s son (1924). One book in the pile was different from my usual diet of literary fiction: Dark Beauty: Hidden Detail in Harry Clarke's Stained Glass by Lucy Costigan and Michael Cullen (Merrion Press).įlicking through this luscious, illustrated hardback, I found dazzling geometry, languid eyes, fabled animals and demonic faces in a glory of colour: purple and crimson canary and turquoise midnight blue.

I had a pile of books to review but each time I opened one I’d get a few paragraphs in and my mind would return to its default setting – something between numbed idleness and dread: I felt like my ancient MacBook, unable to do two tasks at the same time without crashing. At the start of lockdown I couldn’t write and I found reading fiction impossible.

Harry clarke queen mab lithograph phoenix fine art