Michael Longley's Poetics of Painting

Abstract

Michael Longley's Poetics of Painting Jack Quin (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Jeffrey Morgan, Light from Two Windows (acrylic on canvas, 125 x 95 cm), Belfast Waterfront [End Page 54] the welsh painter jeffrey morgan's seated portrait of Michael Longley, Light from Two Windows, meticulously records the poet's eclectic art and literary interests scattered around a room in County Mayo. The painting includes two portraits of Buster Keaton, a picture of Billie Holiday, Robert Fagles's translation of The Iliad, and a couple of notable art books, one on the Japanese artist Hokusai and one on the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi.1 There are a number of curious found objects dotted around the room as well, including a dolphin's skull on the windowsill and an impossibly balanced swan's egg atop a tower of books, which playfully alludes to Brancusi's ovoid sculptures in marble. Through the window is a glimpse of the Mayo countryside with a wedge of swans flying past. Morgan's portrait is the inspiration for Longley's ekphrastic poem "Watercolour" from The Ghost Orchid: Between a chicken's wishbone on the mantelpieceAnd, on the window sill, a dolphin's skull, I sit,My pullover a continuation of the lazy-bedsYou study through the window, my shirt a runningTogether of earth-colours, wintry grasses, brackenPainted with your favourite brush—goose-quill and sableFrom a hundred years ago—and with water:One drop too many and the whole thing disintegrates.In this humidity your watercolour will never dry.2 [End Page 55] The mantelpiece with a chicken's wishbone does not appear in the painted portrait. Rui Carvalho Homem suggests that the object is visible from the perspective of the sitter rather than the perspective of the painter, a reminder that the poem is about sitting for a painting and not merely an ekphrastic account of the finished work.3 Besides the accumulated objects within the room, Longley observes Morgan's painterly technique; how the stitching of the pullover appears as "a continuation of the lazy-beds / You study through the window," and how his red-brown shirt is "a running / Together of earth-colours, wintry grasses, bracken." Morgan remarked that he even thought of his landscape paintings as portraits or self-portraits through the snapshots of domestic interiors, where the accumulation of background objects such as spongeware bowls, clothes, and "everything embod[ies] for me certain aspects of my own mundane domestic existence."4 Longley's eye for detail is borrowing from the language of art history to imagine his portrait as a blending of natural elements: the running together of patterns and colors framed by the window into the central seated figure, drawing the eye downward from the window to the sitter, in this case a serendipitous alignment of the landscape with the sitter. Morgan's portrait was executed during Longley's sabbatical in County Mayo after more than a decade working for the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. Beyond his friendships and familial ties with many painters and sculptors, Longley's lifelong engagements with the visual arts extend from collaborative artist books to exhibition catalog essays, reviews, interviews, and the organization of inter-arts events for the Arts Council. He has collaborated with painters and illustrators on a number of limited editions of his own work, including Out of the Cold (1999), Sea Asters (2015), and Ghetto (2019) with illustrations by his daughter Sarah Longley. He has written a number of prefaces and essays for exhibition catalogs including the work of David Crone, Brian Ferran, and Felim Egan. In the late 1960s to 1970s he wrote a range of articles and interviews for the Irish Times on Gerard Dillon, Colin Middleton, and others. He has contributed ekphrastic poems to gallery exhibitions that explicitly pair writers with artworks in their collection, including A Conversation Piece: Poetry and Art in 2002 with the Ulster Museum and the collections of the National Museums Northern Ireland, and in 2015 the National Gallery of Ireland's exhibition Lines of Vision: Irish Writers on Art. As assistant director of the Arts Council, he edited and contributed the...