It was her late husband, the novelist Francis Stuart, who inadvertently suggested the title Gazing into a Black Bog Hole for Finola Graham's art exhibition, which opened on Saturday. During a discussion, he remarked that: "When Drake was conquering seas for the Empire, the Irish were gazing into a black bog hole."
Graham says her first reaction was to deny this, "with nationalistic hackles rising, but on thinking it over I realised that I feel it is infinitely more interesting to be able to gaze into a black bog than it is to be out conquering seas for an empire. In Titian's dark portraits one has to gaze before the dark forms disentangle themselves from one another, and the same thing happened with Rothko. I think one has to look at a picture a long time before it reveals itself. It's like the chaos theory: the molecules are in chaos until you perceive them, and then they achieve an order."
The exhibition was opened on Saturday by Minister for the Arts, Sile de Valera, at the Logan Gallery, Galway. When Stuart died suddenly last Wednesday, Graham considered cancelling her exhibition, but then decided she "couldn't handle it. I'd have an enormous amount of work to do to put it off. And so I decided to go ahead without thinking about it."
In any case, she is sure that Stuart would have wished her to go ahead: "Of course he would. There's no question but that it would have been against his wishes to put it off."
Graham was Stuart's third wife. At 97, he was roughly twice her age, but still his death came as a shock: "I had always thought Francis would die at 98, because he said he would, and when he made mad statements he was usually right. He would have been 98 at the end of April." He grew weak on Monday and died quietly at the house the couple shared in Fanore, Co Clare. "It was lovely and peaceful at the end," she says.
It was during one of her visits to Paris on a freezing night when the temperature had dropped to minus 12 degrees centigrade, that he proposed to her on the bitterly cold walk that they were forced to make when the car in which they were travelling had broken down. They married in 1987. Her portrait of him in a late medieval style with a series of six tiny scenes taken from his life are among her finest works.
She is one of those rare people for whom there never was anything but drawing and painting. Her home is tribute to this. Through the window-frames, which are painted to resemble Giotto's heavenly fresco pink, the Atlantic ocean stretches out to the Aran islands. Everything about her - her surroundings, her paintings, her framing of them, even her cream coloured silk lace blouses - is dedicated to the aesthetic.
In Paris she was lucky enough to study under the celebrated French painter Gustave Singier, the eminent Russian, Nicolas Wacker, and the mosaicist, Riccardo Liccata. She had a strictly classical training, and she admired the strictly classical Poussin. This has made her that rare thing: a thoroughly modern, but not an abstract artist. But they are all grounded by concrete images. She says: "I could never go completely abstract. I couldn't just let go and have no object."
Vases, jugs, cloaks, and teacups appear again and again in her paintings set down with oriental delicacy. A strong Japanese influence runs through her work, which she signs in Japanese letters. "I think what has most influenced me has been the emphasis that Japanese artists place on knowledge. They believe you must know something thoroughly - an artist can spend years studying the blade of a reed so that he can eventually convey the essence of a reed in a single gesture."
In 1980 she returned from Paris to live in Ireland and set up a workshop for mosaics in Fanore. One of her mosaics, a round table in black Polish marble in which silvery flecks forever catch the light, was bought by Ionesco in Paris. At the centre of the table in tiny, brilliantly coloured yellow, red and pink stone is the head of a cherub (based on her son Daniel). This mosaic foreshadows the paintings in her present exhibition, which shows brilliantly jewelled images against the background of immense bog. The connection between the old work and the new is typical of the way she works: nothing is ever lost, she retains images and ways of expressing emotion.
These most recent, meditative paintings are the culmination of a long struggle to revisit her painful early years. When asked what she thinks of when she does her paintings, she says she thinks that there is always an element of loss. For during her best days in Paris, a series of bereavements - the death of her much loved father, a man noted for his charm, strength and good looks, followed soon after by the deaths of her twin babies - caused her to shrink painfully into her own sensitivities.
She says: "At that time I could not paint colours that were straight from a tube because they seemed too glib, so I began to grind my own colours. I have done so ever since." Her paintings became, as she says, "sombre". People have pointed out to me that my canvases seemed over-crowded with large images. Someone else remarked recently that a large area of blue in one of my paintings was like an abyss. But I feel now that in my bog paintings there is no longer an abyss; there is life."
