Artist's Statement
My recent work comes from time last summer spent on the west coast of Ireland on the Dingle and Kerry peninsulas. The Great Famine haunts the landscape with absence: ruined cottages returning to gorse and bracken or morphing into new stone walls or garden paths. Emigration marks the land with unused fields climbing a mountain. They seem impossibly high to our eyes used to flat fertile land. Even the verge beside a highway would make a field in Ireland.

This land is the far edge of Europe where the next pub is Boston or New York as the Irish pubs declare. Drink now and drink deep! The sea slams into high cliffs, moulds sea caves and makes tidal races where the water boils in opposing currents. The sun dies into the sea, trailing light and spilling over the mud flats of low tide.

My paintings engage with the land, the light and the sea. They refer to the field lines: the small fields drawn by human lives against a rocky mountain. The fields erase in wind and growth. The light picks up hidden lines and the signs of human work on the land. I pick up a brush and paint the edges, field against field, land against sea and sky. I pick up a brush and aim for the light.


An Afternoon with Seals : Great Blasket Island

All day the seals wait for the zodiac whine
deep in the waves, like a bee
humming in water, leaving
revenants on the beach.

        For thousands of years
       women laid nets on the fine ochre sand,
       men patched frail skin boats,
       canoes that could carry a cow lashed tight,
       a package bound, inert, on wooden ribs

       slight
       curved boundaries between
       sea deep sky
       and sky deep sea.

       There were bonfires, dances,
       singing on the fringe of Europe, last
       island before Manhattan, or Newfoundland;
       but the seals could hear farewell,
       farewell in a word: Amerikay

       New York, Boston, Philadelphia,
       Quebec; far islands became cellars,
       sod shanties, paper rooms;

       men dreamed of clouds, and women dreamed of birds
       turning above the lap of the Great Blasket
       her back hunched against the sea
       whose lap cradled white homes and green fields.

       The young go first, the old
       tell stories amongst themselves,
       their tales are stones
       dropped down dry wells.

       The old women wander the beach and
       the seals promenade
       up and down, ten feet from shore,
       twenty in company, their large eyes
       & grey mottled heads following.

       Some hold the souls of the dead and
       the women speak to them in Irish
       as to their absent children.

This, the seals remember when the zodiac comes,
they follow us down the beach,
drift close; we are still

they listen:

trying to recall the Irish words
for mother,
for home.

Artist's Biography
Janet Read lives in Markham where she teaches music. She has exhibited widely in public and commercial galleries; most recently, the Sublunary at the Whitby Station Gallery and, Ocean As Vessel," at The Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa. Her work has been shown in Quebec and many venues in Ontario. She spent last summer on sabbatical in Ireland on the west coast, in Dingle and Kerry. 

She spent the summer of 2004 in Newfoundland, an artist's residency with Pouch Cove. The trace of light and water informs her work. This new series of paintings explores the edge where land and sea meet. On the Dingle the pubs have signs that read, "Next pub, Boston," (in other word, drink now and drink deep).The west of Ireland holds neolithic to present day signs of human occupation and absence. Presence and absence fill the landscape and the sea.

Price Range
Please contact the gallery for more information.