slowly she turned

Every morning, the three of us were picked up at our house and whisked around the corner to Currane House, where the views and the breakfasts were outstanding. I am not much of a breakfast eater and even I could not resist. Usually I had scrambled eggs and sauteed mushrooms, although I had local smoked salmon and cream cheese and that wonderful Irish butter and brown bread a couple of times. This inn had been a pub at one time, and it was renovated beautifully. A movie was made on this location: “My Sailor, My Love,” which I found on Kanopy and another of my classmates found on Amazon Prime. A beautiful, sad movie about aging, love, and family trauma.

Then a local taxi bus picked us all up and we were transported to the Essence of Mulranny art studios for our mixed media workshop with Sandra Duran Wilson.

Note: This was my third try at going to Essence of Mulranny for a workshop. The first was canceled in Summer 2020 when the world shut down. I canceled the second try when I broke my foot a few weeks before the trip.

The class had eight people and we had a second floor room with a wonderful view of Clew Bay and Mulranny Beach and Croagh Patrick. Sheep wandered in the salt marshes and we were told that they often stood in the water when the tide came in.

Sandra led us in some art exercises and then, since the weather was beautiful (as it mostly had been the whole time I was in Ireland!) most of us decided to walk up the road and descend the staircase that led down to the causeway and the bay at low tide.

On the way back up the stairs, there was a side “Fern Trail” that had a lot of fairies living there.

^One of the fast art exercises we did that morning. I used pages from the Irish textbook I bought at a used book sale the week before as well as other book pages provided. This is the view of Croagh Patrick. I’ll probably work on it some more when I have more time.

^Another exercise had all of us using the same photo of a bridge with a rocky stream flowing under it on a background we made earlier in the day. Then we integrated the photo with the background. Again, I never finished mine, but that’s typical for me! Later we would all see this scene in real life. All of our depictions of the same scene were very different.

Lunches and dinners were cooked on site for us and they were so delicious. Lars, Lora’s Danish spouse, was the chef and every night had a different country theme. This was a photo of the Greek dinner. And I am not kidding when I say that I would choose the way he cooked cabbage over dessert any time.

When we returned to the house that evening, Jill and I tried very hard to get photos of the sunset. The bugs were biting so we kept going in and out. But the view from the living room was stunning.