Column | The Composers in the Garden

CORNELIUS BROWNE TRACES THE TENDER INTERSECTIONS OF ART, NATURE, MUSIC, AND LOVE. 

“Bring music” were the first words I heard from my wife’s lips. A stranger, Paula appeared on my doorstep one night in 1987 with her best friend, who I knew vaguely, to invite me to a Halloween party. Smog cloaked the Dublin streets; the bitter air stank. I ran back upstairs and grabbed a handful of cassettes. 

The seeds that grew into my series of paintings, A Garden a Stone’s Throw from the Sea, had already been sown when curator Catherine Marshall contacted me. The invitation to show them as part of September’s Cashel Arts Festival, however, spread sunlight over their growth. As she recovers from cancer, Paula has been healing the overgrown fields amid which we live with sympathetic gardening. She works with the wild, her passion being pollinators. Insects are starved by neatness, our mania for gentrification and order hastening their decline. Paula has created a wildlife haven, a heaven of birdsong. It is a sanctum, also, to her painter husband. Melodies of colour flow from Paula’s begrimed fingers, timed to detonate months ahead, a leafy orchestration covering the year with fading beauty and fresh blossoms. 

Among my reasons for only painting outdoors lies a need to hear, as well as see, the landscape. Some of my paintings are not much larger than flower heads. I have always been drawn to the challenge of condensing as much feeling as I can into the smallest possible space. Catherine and I quickly realised that this made them ideal for Cashel. The unorthodox venue, in the Chapter House of the Church of Ireland Cathedral, offers none of the roomy blankness associated with contemporary art. Catherine’s photographs of bookcases and vitrines, which might be used in lieu of walls, caught under my sunhat like an old tune. 

One of my pleasures, listening to music, is tracing the journey of a single note in, let’s say, a Bach fugue. Painting her garden, my eyes often follow the journey of one of Paula’s pollinators. A bee buzzes past Anton Bruckner, born 200 years ago this year, on 4 September 1824. His short sacred choral works, the beautiful motets, have always struck me as small devotional gardens. An evening moth guides Nicola LeFanu through the trees. Her Sextet: Fasach – A Wild Garden, first performed at the Hugh Lane Gallery in 1997, and inspired by the composer’s favourite wild places along the western coastline of Ireland, frequently lends texture to my paintings. A butterfly rests upon the shoulder of Claude Debussy, near the willow from which Paula has suspended a watering can. My painting hopes to borrow notes from the opening flute solo of Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (1892-94), where Debussy set to music the poem by Mallarmé, the flute “watering the grove with melodies.”

In late May, on the edge of her garden, mid-conversation, Paula collapsed. She had suffered a ruptured brain aneurysm, a subarachnoid haemorrhage. “I’m dying,” she gasped into the grass pressing her lips. The next day I was in Dublin with our two children, as their mother underwent surgery. Dusk falling on the Grand Canal, I decided to show Cornelia and Lucian the window of the basement flat where Paula and I had lived for a decade. Peering from the pavement, after our sleepless night and long journey, we barely registered the door opening, or the man asking if he could help us. My garbled explanation led to an invitation inside to meet the man’s wife and revisit the past. 

Our shabby home was unrecognisable under layers of gentrification. Only the concrete backyard, now bare, retained Paula’s presence. This tiny space she had crammed with so many plants in terracotta pots that it took an entire lorry to move them to Donegal. Across 20 winters the terracotta crumbled, freeing captives to spread luxuriously. Painting Paula’s garden, I am among the leaves and blooms of our shared youth. Into my life she has brought such music. 

Cornelius Browne is an artist based in County Donegal.