Blasket Islands to Vogue magazine: Maria Simonds-Gooding on art adventures, Kerry travels, and Peig's son
Maria Simonds-Gooding spent a lot of time on the Blaskets and other islands off Co Kerry. Picture: Mike Edgar
Lucy and Robert Carter of the Grilse Gallery in Killorglin would have pleased many of Maria Simonds-Gooding’s admirers by mounting an exhibition of her recent work.
Wisely, they have chosen instead to show a selection of the Dunquin-based artist’s paintings, plaster works and prints from throughout her career, demonstrating the evolution of her unique style over six decades. The exhibition, What land and country is this?, will run until 18 May.
Simonds-Gooding has led a colourful life. Born in India in 1939, to an Irish mother and an English father who served as an officer in the British army, she moved with her family to Dooks, near Glenbeigh, when she was seven.
Hers was an idyllic childhood; she was home schooled till she was 12, and never settled into conventional education, leaving school without qualifications at 16.
Simonds-Gooding always had an inkling that she would study art, but her parents were not so enthusiastic about the prospect, fearing she would never earn a living as an artist. But she persisted, working at a variety of jobs while she saved the money to go to college. The one she remembers most vividly was her stint as a matron in Worth Abbey, a Benedictine monastery in Sussex.
“I was in charge of 52 boys,” she says. “I made sure they washed before going to bed at night, and I got them out of bed in the morning, all that sort of stuff. I liked the boys a lot, but I had to darn all their socks, so I spent hour after hour in the sewing room. It was just too much, horrendous. I did it for a year, and then I left to study art.”
The first college she attended was the National College of Art and Design in Dublin. “But that was an absolute waste of time,” she says, “a nightmare.”
She left within a year, moving to Belgium, where another art college, Lausanne de Peinture, proved to be as great a disappointment. She finally found her feet studying painting at Bath Academy in the UK, where she completed her degree.
Simonds-Gooding was always back and forth to visit her family at Dooks. In her early twenties, she began venturing further west, visiting Dunquin and the Blasket Islands. “In those days, Dunquin was extremely remote,” she says. “But everything about it attracted me, especially the Irish language. Wherever you have remoteness, it doesn't matter where it is in the world, you have more of the original culture and all that goes with it, and those were the things that really did and still do fascinate me.”
Eventually, she moved to Dunquin. She lived in a caravan in Baile Bhiocáire for a time, and befriended her neighbour Micheál ‘An File’ Ó Gaoithín, Peig Sayers’ son and a well-known poet in his own right.
“I got this idea one day,” she says. “I brought tons of paper and paints and brushes over to his house. He groaned when he saw them, like he had no interest, but when I went back a few days later, he had done this wonderful painting from memory, of Peig with her cat. And from then on, he never stopped painting till the day he died. I never taught him a thing, but he did hundreds of paintings and drawings.”
Many of Ó Gaoithín’s paintings adorn the walls of her cottage in the townland of Ceathrú, which she bought in 1968 from Maidhc Shea Faight, a Blasket Islander who’d restored it 20 years before and lived there with his sister until they moved into Dingle.
“Maidhc brought out the wooden roof from his home on the Blasket, and he built the house to fit it. So this is a classic Blasket Island cottage, 12 feet by 22, only it’s on the mainland.”
Simonds-Gooding soon added a new bedroom, which she used as her studio for many years. She put out cards advertising her paintings and prints, and people would call to the cottage to buy them. Before long, largely through word of mouth, she was showing regularly, in Dingle, Cork and Dublin.
She was featured in newspapers, on radio and television. A profile in magazine led to a number of exhibitions in New York. As she became more successful, she added further rooms to the house, including the large studio she uses to this day.
Simonds-Gooding has travelled widely, in New Mexico, Mali, Georgia and Egypt. “I loved the Sinai Mountains,” she says. “There’s a monastery 5,000 feet up, in a little valley, and then the mountain goes up another 7,000 feet, and that’s where Moses received the Ten Commandments.”
She has had many adventures closer to home. She recalls how she once wrangled an invitation from the OPW to spend a night on Skellig Michael, but the weather was so bad, she stayed for two. The drawings she made on that occasion inspired a number of the etchings in her current show.
Further back, in 1968, she spent an enchanting few weeks on Inishvickillane, picking shellfish and snaring rabbits for food as she worked on her sketchbooks.
This was long before Charles Haughey bought the island from the Ó Dálaigh family; Simonds-Gooding was ferried out by a party of scuba divers in a dinghy, and she stayed in a tent.
There was no bedsheet, “and you have no idea of how many beetles and God knows what got into my sleeping bag. But I would have put up with anything for my art.”
She was enthralled by the island lore. One drystone wall by the Ó Dálaighs’ cottage was said to have been built to protect a blind sheep from falling into the sea. “What farmer today would go to that trouble?” she says. “But that’s the kind of thing I look for, and that’s why I love going to such remote places.”
In October, Simonds-Gooding will be part of a three-person exhibition, along with Micheál Ó Gaoithín and the Antiguan artist Frank Walter at Dublin Castle. Again, she is taking the whole thing in her stride. “I’m just sitting here, and all this is happening,” she says. “And that’s how it’s always been.”
- Maria Simonds-Gooding, What land and country is this?, runs at the Grilse Gallery in Killorglin until 18 May. Further information: grilse.ie; simonds-gooding.com
