For all that it is dirty, and populated by hairy savages, Dublin is not a bad old place to live.
Everything is small, including the distances between places. On a good day, the place looks like the postcards on sale in Carrolls – all those multi-coloured buildings on Bachelor’s Walk crisp and quaint, the Liffey clean and full-tided, the Spire worrying the clouds if there were any…
On a bad day, the place looks like a dystopian nightmare – junkies congregating on the boardwalk, bellowing at each other across streets, litter everywhere, the street pocked and poxxed with puddles, the Liffey low-tided and shopping-trolleyed.
More than most places, Dublin is reflexive. Dublin seems as you feel.
If you are in a good mood, when the world seems full of possibility, then Dublin’s streets vibrate with the same energy. There is curiosity around every corner, places to explore. Quirky history abounds, there are always parks you’ve never been to, galleries you’ve never been to. New restaurants you’d like to eat in, free events on, new flicks in the IFI. The banter in the pubs is witty. The sun is shining. Or if not, then the fat raindrops playfully plop on your unfurrowed brow, the lines to the sky like spiderweb gossamer, resonating to your happy thoughts.
If you are in a bad mood, when the world seems inconsequential, then Dublin is not the place to be. Its dull, you see the worst, you suspect all. Its smallness begets paranoia, claustrophobia. The pubs are full of wastrels and down-and-outs. History is ended twenty years ago. Character is dead. The streets are leaden, sodden with rain, sopping with concrete despondency. All is bland. The title of the Jimmy Cake album, “Dublin gone, everybody dead”, seems like wishful thinking. There’s nowhere you can get a good coffee. Anywhere good is crowded anyway. Its all like a skank midland town, a giant Mullingar, all traffic fumes and mute desperation.
It is in this headspace that I imagine Patrick Collins painted “Liffey Quaysides”, one of my favourite paintings, if not my favourite painting. It is on permanent exhibition in the National Gallery.
It depicts a view from O’Connell Bridge, taking in the quaysides and Halfpenny bridge. It is painted in iron gray colours. It is not flattering to Dublin. The quayside edifices seem to loom and crowd over the waters, the columns in the Halfpenny bridge seem like prison bars. The painting’s borders crowd in, crimping the view and emphasise the menace of the view.
To me, this is a psychological picture. Collins, with the grey hues, has literally painted the city with the same negative brush. There is no redemption here. The view is blurred, as if Collins came to the conclusion that he needn’t bother go into any further definition – it’d all be crap anyway. But more, it seems as if the view he depicts is that of one through weeping eyes. (Or maybe he was just very short-sighted?) Why weeping?
As I said, Dublin is reflexive. I can visualise Collins taking in the view, preoccupied with whatever was eating him, oblivious to the hoards of people crossing sides behind him, the hustle and bustle, in his moment of melancholy.
Collins was from Sligo, but went to school in Glasnevin. He worked for twenty years in an insurance company, studying at night and painting in his spare time (maybe there’s hope for me). He was inspired by Joyce’s Ulysses. He lived in a tower in Howth Castle for a time. He moved to Brittanny in his sixties, then Normandy and finally Nice. He returned to Dublin after 6 years and died in Monkstown in 1994.
I haven’t seen much else by Collins besides “Liffey Quaysides”, but for me, this painting is more powerful than any by Yeats or by Orpen. I keep finding new things to admire in it, new points of speculation. I’d recommend a trip next time you pass through Clare St. Depending on your frame of mind, of course.
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