Artist Songs – An exhibition of 25 new paintings by Padraig McCaul

The Doorway Gallery, Wicklow Street, Dublin 2

August 20^th – Sept 3^rd

With special guest, renowned folk singer/songwriter Donal O’Connor, who will by premiering his new song, ‘The Heart of the Artist’.

I am not a writer.

But if I was, I would use words to describe the unique beauty and awesome power of the west of Ireland coastal landscape, and the effect it has and has had on me. How it makes me feel watching the day disappear as the sun rolls down the slope of Achill’s Slievemore mountain and into the Atlantic Ocean before setting below the horizon. I would tell you about the quietness of it, the simple pleasure of sitting in the landscape, surrounded by the richness of its colours, with the only sounds coming from the rustle of wild grasses in the wind, the swoop and call of the birds and the sounds of distant waves on a beach. Perhaps Keel Beach, with the towering Minaun cliffs standing guard over it. I would use words to describe the sense of calm and stillness it leaves me with, standing on a deserted Keem Bay on Achill island, on a Sunday morning family walk in November, wrapped against the winter cold and feeling the salty air on my face. 

And then I would wrap those words in music and create songs for people to sing. Using carefully crafted melodies played over simple open chord progressions that lull you into a hypnotic groove, a trance, that allows you drift into your own thoughts and to create your own pictures and images of quiet beaches and solitary cottages and blue mountains. I would make arrangements for those songs using all the instruments I could find, the sounds of the different instruments providing the colours I see, each instrument weaving and blending with the next, creating close knit harmonies and counterpoints that feed the soul.

But I am not a writer, I am a painter. And so, I create my songs on canvas.

And I’ll call them Artist Songs. PADRAIG MCCAUL

CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE EXHIBITION