Living between two lights

Fiona Marron with her husband, flautist Brian Dunning, at the opening of her exhibition in The Good Food Gallery.

It seems to be a thing with people who become professional artists, that they have had the interest for as long as they can remember, writes Brian Byrne. Fiona Marron from Clane is just like that.

“I have always been drawing,” she said at the recent opening of her latest exhibition, in The Good Food Gallery. “I believe I was drawing even before I was writing, expressing myself with pictures as a child.”

Even after she did learn to write, in those early days she used to try and illustrate her essays with drawings. “Something that didn’t go down well with the teachers,” she laughs.

But ever since finding the power of words too, they have always been important to Fiona. Even the exhibition opening night included love poetry read by friends such as Mary O’Donnell, as well as music played by her flautist husband Brian Dunning. “I think all art forms are interconnected anyway, and I love bringing them together.”

Painting is something she feels compelled to do, and because it’s something she has done from an early age, she can’t believe she wouldn’t be doing it. Yet it wasn’t something she considered as a career while going through school.

“Not at all. It was always going to be a teacher or a doctor or a lawyer, or something sensible like that. I didn’t even know there was an art school where you could go and learn.”

It was through another branch of the arts that she found the possibility. Her first violin teacher was the late TC Kelly, the well-known conductor and composer. He recognised her painting talent. “He told my Mum and Dad that I had something, and if I wanted to go with it they should let me. And he told us about the National College of Art.”

Fiona’s parents agreed to let her go to the College, but with a condition that she went there to study as an art teacher. She was accepted by NCAD on the basis of a portfolio in 1978, before she had even done her Leaving Cert.

“I spent five years there. It was a growing up time, and it was tough. They don’t take prisoners in NCAD, but I suppose if you want to work as a painter, and you’re still doing it after they have cut strips off you, there must be something there.”

Before finishing College she had managed to put pieces on exhibition. Encouraged by two of her tutors, she brought some of her work to the Lincoln Gallery in Dublin and was offered a slot. “This was marvelous. It was part of a group show, and I sold two of the four pieces I put in. On the strength of that I was offered a solo show the following year, 1984.”

She came out with the teaching diploma that her parents had insisted on, and later achieved a degree in Fine Art. But instead of taking up a teaching position in a secondary school, she ’gallivanted’ off to Europe and America, getting involved in exhibitions and the ’life of the artist’. She had met ’that flute player’ while in College, and he had told her of playing jazz in America. That sparked Fiona’s imagination and when she said she was going to New York to live and exhibit, he went along too.

“It went really well. We lived in America for 14 years, including New York for a year where I did get into a gallery on 57th Street. I was still naive, though, and never followed up on that, didn’t really know the setup.”

They moved to the west coast, to Portland, Oregon. “It was beautiful and we loved it there, and I was fascinated with American landscape which was breathtaking and beautiful. But it didn’t move my soul, and it wasn’t home.”

As she puts it, ’home was always calling out’, so they came back, and settled in Fiona’s home village of Clane. It was returning home to the kind of landscapes which had always fascinated her, which did ’move her soul’. Mainly the bogs and the seacoasts.

“A friend once told me that when you’re Irish, it’s ’in the blood and bones’. And sometimes when I’m sweating away in my studio, I think it is the blood and the bones which goes on with the digging and scraping, working and reworking to find the truth in the piece.”

The west of Ireland renews her inspiration whenever she needs it. “It’s the light, always the light in the west. It’s amazing, especially the twilights, ’Idir an Dá Sholas’, as my friend Micheal O Domhnaill used to say.” Though not a native speaker, Fiona puts Irish titles on her works when she brings them back to America. “They don’t know what they are about, and they’ll always be fascinated to find out what the titles mean, like ’Idir an Dá Sholas’ which is the title of one.”

And of course, the twilight in the west of Ireland is a much more lingering affair than that in Oregon, which slips very quickly from day into night. “It is spectacular to stand there watching it, looking at it with an artist’s eye, constantly seeking, searching, looking at shape and form. That’s what nourishes me, feeds me, what I need to be looking at. The longer you see things, the more magic, and drama, is going to influence what you feel. And the west of Ireland is like another country.”

The works in the Good Food Gallery are mainly reflections of Kildare and the south-east coast around Hook Head, another favourite of Fiona’s. She has a little house in Slade Harbour, which reminds her of Ireland 30 years ago. “I love it, out by the rocks, and it has been sort of informing me for the last while.”

Although she has been involved in hundreds of exhibitions over the last three decades, Fiona says she is still nervous before an opening. “I was shaking before this one. It’s a baring of your soul, you’re putting your innermost feelings and expressions out. It’s an honour and a privilege to be able to do what I love to do.”

There’s something a little bit extra about this current exhibition, which she has quietly dedicated to her mother who passed away a while ago. “She was my biggest supporter, but we all have to keep going on. Art and poetry and music, we need them in our lives.”

She has three boys, aged 12-23, the eldest of whom ’has his degree in his back pocket, but wants to explore a band he plays in’. “He asked me did I mind, and what could I say but ’go ahead’,” she laughs.

Fiona seems a very happy person, and when that is suggested she says she is ’lucky and blessed’ with very great friends and family. “There are the normal stresses and strains of life, but I have to remind myself of that sometimes. I always try to have a positive outlook.”

It is refreshing in these difficult times, when much of what we hear from many quarters is doleful, to hear somebody speak positively of an aspect of the country. “Ireland has this sense of always giving us a joy, and a renewal, because it is so beautiful. We mustn’t lose that, and we may have to remind ourselves about that now.”

This article was first published in The Kildare Nationalist.