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AE/George Russell's Donegal Seascapes
Today I found a youtube collection of Æ/George Russell’s seascapes. Most of them he painted from the beach near my house. How I love those familiar rolling hills, that featureless sky.
The first thing you learn about Æ is that he wanted us to call him by a symbol that he said represented “the æon.” I don’t think he meant to use this magical name publicly, but it is by the “Æ” that he mostly known. He is usually remembered for his work as a cultural leader and friend of Yeats, but he was active in building Irish institutions after independence including cooperative creameries and banks, the first hydroelectric power plant, and an international airport.
I love every one of paintings. Many of them are similar to this one in the National Gallery:
Or this one, “Lordly Ones Appearing to a Turf Cutter:”
There’s a wonderful interview with Æ published in 1908 that’s worth reading for its earnest details.
Q.—Can you describe the shining beings?
A—It is very difficult to give any intelligible description of them. The first time I saw them with great vividness I was lying on a hill-side alone in the west of Ireland, in County Sligo: I had been listening to music in the air, and to what seemed to be the sound of bells, and was trying to understand these aerial clashings in which wind seemed to break upon wind in an ever-changing musical silvery sound. Then the space before me grew luminous, and I began to see one beautiful being after another.’
Q—Can you describe one of the opalescent beings?
A—The first of these I saw I remember very clearly, and the manner of its appearance: there was at first a dazzle of light, and then I saw that this came from the heart of a tall figure with a body apparently shaped out of half-transparent or opalescent air, and throughout the body ran a radiant, electrical fire, to which the heart seemed the centre. Around the head of this being and through its waving luminous hair, which was blown all about the body like living strands of gold, there appeared flaming wing-like auras. From the being itself light seemed to stream outwards in every direction; and the effect left on me after the vision was one of extraordinary lightness, joyousness, or ecstasy.”
(full text in The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries by W. Y. Evans-Wentz 1911.)
My favorite paintings are his Donegal landscapes, and to find them all collected together fills me with joy.
I crossed that same creek this morning, the beach covered in tiny clam shells, just like 100 years ago. If those women looked up, they’d see Muckish just like I did today.