With the celebration of St. Patrick’s Day, everyone in town becomes Irish. Yet for Stonington artist Carmel McEvoy Bourneuf, the rolling green hillsides of Ireland are just as much in her dreams and memories as they are in the oil paintings she creates.
Bourneuf, originally from the tiny village of Clonaslee in County Laois, Ireland, is part of a month-long art exhibit called Memories O’ Ireland at the Yellow House Coffee and Tea Room in the Stonington Borough through March 31.
With distant mountains offsetting emerald green patches of farmland prevalent in many of her paintings, Bourneuf says most of her work focuses on the various landscapes found in the Irish countryside. Of particular interest to her are the thatch-roofed, stone-walled cottages that dot the hillsides she remembers from her childhood.
Bourneuf said she has always been interested in the arts, showing a penchant for artwork while growing up on a small farm. It wasn’t until years later when she and her husband, Gus, had moved to New Orleans that she had any formal training.
Having already taken up ceramics as a hobby, a friend of Bourneuf’s invited her to a local painting class and Bourneuf never looked back. After a move to New Jersey, she was soon selling some of her paintings at a small Irish imports store where customers would sometimes request specific scenes for Bourneuf to paint. Her trademark cottages usually found their way into most of the paintings. When painting, Bourneuf said she will often start by painting the cottage first and build the landscape around it, an unconventional method.
“Sometimes I’ll just put the cottage in first, I usually use my grandfather’s [cottage] because I have that one in here,” Bourneuf said, pointing to her head. “Then the background comes in, so you start to get the scene. And Ireland is always patchwork—you have the rocks and all the land is divided just like a patchwork quilt…The foreground comes in last, but once I see what I’m doing I might move the cottage completely or change the angle. That’s what’s nice about oil painting, you can change things around. You can’t do that with watercolor; once it’s on there it’s there.”
Bourneuf’s paintings have gained a good measure of praise and attention, yet she’ll be the first to admit that she isn’t overly concerned with how much of her work sells. In fact, Bourneuf, now retired, said she paints because it’s her passion and her creative outlet.
But painting is not the only art form about which Bourneuf is passionate.
Donning an Irish patchwork vest over a green shirt, Bourneuf produced an acoustic guitar and rolled into a whimsical Irish ditty, something she is known to do often. Bourneuf has an extensive collection of Irish songs and lyrics that she keeps on hand in case she needs to put on an impromptu performance. And while she has been known to burst into song (she also plays the harmonica) at any moment, most of her music these days is played at various local senior citizen homes where she frequently volunteers.
When volunteering Bourneuf will commonly sandwich two brief musical performances around a painting demonstration, something she says the crowd usually loves.
“When I’m doing a demonstration, I always color the canvas first because you can’t paint on a white canvas,” Bourneuf said. “So first I’ll do the sky and then I’ll put the mountains in and they’ll all say, ‘Oh look, here comes the mountains.’ Then I’ll put in the light with yellows and then I’ll start on the green of the patchwork as I’m coming down from the mountains. Then I’ll build a cottage and I do most of this with my palette knife. But they absolutely love that because they see it coming to life right in front of them.”
Another unique aspect to Bourneuf’s artwork is the depth and three-dimensional qualities she is able to achieve. By using brushes sparingly and doing most of her painting with a palette knife, Bourneuf not only paints the picture but she is able to “shape” the paint as well, creating a variety of physical and visual textures. The method is somewhat time-consuming, with certain paintings taking as long as two or three weeks to complete.
“I did a painting of a castle recently for a friend of mine, and she called me up and she said, ‘You know, my daughter says she feels like she can almost walk right inside the castle,’ because it’s thick paint on the outside, so it does have a nice three-dimensional feel. I often get that response when I use the palette knife.”
Bourneuf’s paintings are clearly an expression of her love for her homeland, and seeing the real thing is a yearly priority. With nearly all of her family still in Ireland, and her aunt now living on the family farm, Bourneuf will typically visit Ireland at least once a year for two or three weeks. Not surprisingly, one of her favorite things to do besides visit with old friends and family is scour the back roads looking for new and interesting subjects to paint.
On her last trip to Ireland to visit Gus’ Uncle Charlie, Bourneuf’s hobby helped to forge a new friendship.
“We were out walking one day and we came across this cottage...It was just your typical lovely cottage there, with your thatch roof and stone wall and a bike outside,” Bourneuf said. “‘Oh my god,’ I said, ‘I have to photograph this one.’
“Just then the woman comes out and I asked her if she minded if I paint her cottage and she said, ‘Oh, not at all,’ so she came back out with a pot of tea and soda bread and brown bread…we had a feast! The woman’s daughter came by and saw what I was doing and asked how much I wanted for the painting because her mother was turning 99 in October. I said, ‘I’ll tell you what—if you bring old Uncle Charlie up the road some nice soda bread, you can have it.’”
The woman obliged and not long after, Gus’ uncle was invited to the older woman’s 99th birthday party.
Bourneuf paintings are refreshingly unique in an area saturated with maritime art and artists. Her landscapes exude peace and tranquility as Bourneuf herself admits that her images are every bit her own daydreams of the Ireland that once existed.
“She still has a very romantic view of Ireland as opposed to a practical or pragmatic view, so she paints Ireland as she perceives it to be, her perception of what much of Ireland was,” said Gus.