Weird Stuff Goin' Down
About a week before I made the attached painting, we'd watched the Mating of the Herrings, kippers still at sea, at a large bay further north on the coast. They absolutely filled the bay, and churned it up as predators joined the party and the male fish fought for possession of the females. A week later this is Dunworley Bay, a tiny, tight little bay, a few miles down the coast, nearer darkness than dusk, glowing something unearthly. A Council health inspector who was with us thought that the detritus from the melee up the coast had by some trick of the currents in the Irish Channel been washed into this tiny bay and trapped there, and rotted away merrily. The large dark grey shape near the bottom is a dead predator on the predators of the herrings, or perhaps even another layer up, too big to be seen alive in this confined bay. The grey shape nearer the middle of the image heading for the exit was probably a large sand shark, a scavenger who'll eat anything and is the curse of anglers. Further out the weather was so bad that I couldn't quite tell where the sea started and the disturbed clouds began; it's the first spatial definition you lose when the weather here turns nasty. Closer in, whatever the slimy corruption was lit up the small bay and the cliff like a movie set. The ladies hanging on to my Goretex mountain jacket were telling me to hurry up with my painting because we still had a couple of hours on the road to get home and they feared the wind would blow us over the edge into the eerie muck below. (Not at all unlikely. An Australian friend who came to visit us, despite my warning not to come after the end of September, got delayed by his work for Médecins Sans Frontières and turned up nearer the end of October. He got blown over the edge at the Cliffs of Moher, on the other side of Ireland on the Wild Atlantic Way where we normally took guests after showing them The Burren, an Irish version of a desert -- yeah, truly --, and was saved from a messy death on the rocks a couple of hundred feet below because he was wearing my cashmere overcoat tightly buttoned up, so that when I grabbed the collar and his shoulder it didn't split and he didn't fall out of it, though he had bruises on his shoulder front and back where my fingers had dug in and on his neck where my knuckles had pressed in precisely to hold him in by friction; the coat wasn't damaged. The next year someone put up a rail there, perhaps the gift shop -- you can't sell trinkets to tourists who've fallen over the edge.)
