Don Conroy and a lifetime of inspiring creativity: 'I think there is a war on beauty'

Chani Anderson joins artist Don Conroy to discuss nature, art, the passing of time — and the release of his latest book, ‘The Artist Within’

Don Conroy, artist, television personality and environmentalist. Don continues to inspire others to discover their own creativity, encouraging people to enjoy the process rather than worry about the outcome. Picture: Chani Anderson

“Looking is not always seeing” is the kind of sentence that sounds simple when you first hear it, but sitting across from Don Conroy, listening to him talk about nature and art and children and the passing of time, it becomes clear that there is a lifetime of thought behind those five words.

At 86, Don still has the mischievous twinkle and wide smile that I remember from the television screen, there is something about him that makes the years between the man who once sat in The Den encouraging children to draw and the man sitting in front of me now seem to disappear completely.

He talks about himself as a five-year-old with such clarity that I can almost picture the child he describes, lying on the kitchen floor in Dublin with a pencil and paper, while his mother stepped over him to get from one side of the small kitchen to the other.

“Would you not like to sit up at the table?” she would ask him. It had never even occurred to him, he was perfectly happy where he was.

Sometimes, when his older siblings came into the kitchen, he would crawl underneath the table and continue drawing there, watching through the legs of the adults moving around him.

“It was like a little magical place,” he tells me.

It is an oddly perfect place for our conversation to begin, because that little boy under the table, fascinated by the world he could see from a different perspective, is still very much present in the man now sitting opposite me.

The youngest of five children, Don was just six months old when his father died. His mother, despite the pressure she must have been under as a lone parent in a post-war Ireland, encouraged his creativity from the very beginning, making sure he had the art materials he needed and taking pleasure in his fascination with pictures and the natural world.

“She was a gentle soul,” Don smiles fondly.

An archive photo of Don Conroy in his studio

He remembers being eight years old and returning from a Saturday matinee at the local cinema, his head filled with images of the Wild West. In his excitement he tripped over words while attempting to describe the scenes he had watched as his mother made dinner. Patiently she suggested he try drawing them instead. He was soon drawing everything he saw. A few months later, a picture of a robin would prove particularly significant.

He vividly remembers the red breasted songbird singing enthusiastically outside a hospital window that he painted on a get-well card for his Aunt Elizabeth.

“She was delighted with the picture” — and secretly entered it into the BP art competition.

A few weeks later a brown paper parcel arrived from England. Don describes the first-class stamp with crowned silhouette, the first of its kind he’d seen, and mirthfully admits that he initially thought the Queen had written to him personally. When he opened the package, the surprise was even better. He had won first place. The prize was a book filled with information about the wildlife of Britain and Ireland.

Don Conroy shares some of his artwork. Picture: Chani Anderson

He lived near Herbert Park and spent hours walking along the Dodder river watching patiently for the sudden flash of turquoise from a kingfisher, or a heron tugging an eel free from the water. He didn’t necessarily know what all these creatures were when he first saw them, but the book changed that. It gave names to the birds and animals he was already fascinated by, and that sense of wonder never left him.

Since then, Don Conroy has spent a lifetime looking. And, more importantly, encouraging other people to look too.

For those of us who grew up watching The Den, the name Don Conroy carries very warm memories. He was Uncle Don, the man who could sit down with a pencil and somehow turn a blank sheet of paper into an owl, a fox, or a bird before our eyes, making the whole thing look so effortless that you went away convinced you could do it too.

Don Conroy on the Den

I was one of those children.

I don’t remember ever producing anything remotely worthy of a frame, but I remember the feeling of sitting down with a pencil and trying, and looking back now, I think what Don was giving us was something much more valuable than a lesson in drawing.

When I tell him I believe he was partly the reason why I spend so much of my own free time watching the natural world through a camera lens, he is typically modest.

“I just wanted to share my enthusiasm,” he says.

It is this sentiment that sits, not just at the heart of The Artist Within, his new book, but also at the heart of Don’s entire life.

He has never really been interested in telling people how to become artists. What he wants, rather, is to remind people that the creative instinct is always there, even after somebody tells us we are not good enough.

Don Conroy: 'I just waned to share my enthusiasm.' Picture: Chani Anderson

Children don’t worry about whether the circle is perfectly round or whether they have used the correct shade of red. They draw because they want to draw, and they create stories around their pictures without any concern for whether anybody else understands them. Then something changes.

“They move from the joy of doing it to looking for approval,” Don says.

He knows that process himself.

He had moved through his school years listening to his peers talk about becoming footballers and accountants, but Don had no interest in any of that. He announced in class one day that he was going to be an artist.

His teacher was not impressed.

Artists, he was told, were somehow suspect.

It could easily have been one of those small comments that stays with a child and changes the direction of a life. Luckily other adults were more supportive, he remembers particularly a solicitous librarian who steered him away from the comics and into the art section where he discovered pencil drawings by Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and Leonardo da Vinci instead and he realised then how powerful a simple sketch can be.

It is the reason he can talk to me for an hour about a blackbird.

An archive photo of Don Conroy sketching a bird up close

He describes watching one sitting in an apple tree in April, its rich black feathers against the branches, the orange-yellow bill and the little yellow ring around its eye.

“You just marvel at it.” And perhaps that is why the book he has written now feels less like a book about art and more like a gentle attempt to pull people back towards something they may have lost without even knowing it.

The Artist Within is not a heavy instruction manual telling you how to paint or draw. It is a collection of thoughts, memories and small episodes intended, as Don puts it, to “bring awareness”, to encourage people to look at the world with fresh eyes and give themselves permission to be creative.

He is particularly concerned about the way fear and anxiety can close people down.

“We’re being hijacked,” he tells me.

He worries that we have become so consumed by what is happening around us, by the constant stream of information and the pressure to have an opinion on everything, that we are losing the ability simply to stop and notice something beautiful.

And he believes that matters.

“I think there is a war on beauty that’s going on,” he says.

He talks about music, poetry, painting and literature as portals into something beyond the purely logical, a way of stepping outside the constant noise of everyday life and remembering that there is more to being human than simply moving from one task to the next.

In our couple of hours together he talks about Beethoven, recites Sassoon’s poetry, and marvels at the beauty of a child’s face, but he is equally capable of becoming completely absorbed in the changing colour of leaves through the window, or the sound of a blackbird singing.

Don doesn’t deny that life is difficult.

His own life has contained loss and disappointment, and there have been difficult periods and endings along the way, the death of his mother particularly affected him. But he is resistant to the idea that we should build our identity around what has happened to us.

“There is so much of that out there,” he says. “People have tragedies or hardships, but I don’t think we should be dwelling on them.” Instead, he talks about the ideas that inspire him. He is not proposing a grand solution to the world’s problems, just that we spend a little more time focusing on what is right rather than wrong with the world.

Take time to smell a flower.

Or watch an ant.

Or pick up a pencil.

Or listen to somebody properly when they are speaking.

That last one matters to him very much. Over the course of his life, Don says, people have approached him in all sorts of places and told him their stories.

“One of the gifts we can give ourselves as well as the other person is the time to sit and listen, you never know what you will hear or learn.”

There is something particularly humble about that coming from a man whose face is still recognised by thousands of people who grew up watching him on television.

We could easily have spent our time together talking about his many achievements and wildlife projects, from helping to reintroduce the golden eagle to Ireland, to his involvement in establishing a whale and dolphin sanctuary in Irish waters. But when I ask him about his conservation work, books, and campaigns he has been involved with over the years, he immediately starts trying to take himself out of the story.

Don Conroy: 'Be yourself and allow others the privilege to do the same.' Picture: Chani Anderson

“It shouldn’t be about me,” he says steering the conversation back to the ideas that have been going around in his head for years and have finally been penned in The Artist Within.

He talks about gratitude, about turning resentment into privilege, about being grateful that you are alive, that you can have a conversation, drink a cup of coffee, go for a walk, grow something or simply sit and watch the world.

“Turning resentment into privilege and gratitude,” he says. “That’s the key.” And he makes a distinction between happiness and contentment that feels particularly appropriate for someone who has spent so much of his life encouraging people to stop chasing perfection. “Everybody’s striving for happiness, but happiness can be very elusive,” he says.

Excitement and elation are wonderful, he tells me, but they are fleeting.

“Whereas contentment will last a lifetime.” Perhaps contentment is what I feel most when I sit with him.

Before I leave, I ask him one final question.

If the five-year-old boy hiding under the kitchen table is listening, what advice would he have for him?

He thinks about it for a moment.

“Be yourself,” he says, “and allow others the privilege to do the same.” With that he quietly dips his paintbrush into a jar of marbled water and turns back to his easel. The child still lives there in his twinkling eyes, but at 86, he has become rather wise.

• The Artist Within: Stories and Sketches to Awaken Your Creative Spirit by Don Conroy, published by Gill, wil be released on October 29