7 August 2025
Suffering from cathexis? An obsession with a subject or a person that consumes psychic energy. I suspect many of us are as we watch the destruction of Gaza and the death of democracy in the USA.
Picture of the Week
I’ve long been an admirer of Elizabeth Magill. Her strikingly coloured landscapes, with trees especially prominent, have an unusual and unsettling quality. There is more going on than a romantic affinity with the natural world. Her paintings are often saturated with oranges, reds and purples and random flecks of bright paint - suggestive of toxicity. Look at Mother Nature on the run she seems to be inferring. Aside from her art, her concern for our poisoned planet is shown in more practical ways. In recent years she and her partner have planted five thousand trees in County Antrim. This painting, Violet Crows, is on show at Maya Frodeman Gallery, Jackson, Wyoming, USA until 27 September. Magill is represented by the Kerlin Gallery in Dublin.
From the Moronic Inferno
The accelerating slide into Fascism and the erosion of democracy in the USA is exemplified by the Texan gerrymander and the move to arrest the Democratic politicians who have made a strategic exit from the state. Another scarcely believable episode is the trawling of the Epstein files by federal employees looking for references to Trump. This latter manoeuvre could have backfired if the training video for these employees sees the light of day.
Two of the best commentators on these issues and on the accelerating decline of the USA, and the machinations of the moron-in-chief, are Tina Brown (whose virtues as a writer I’ve had cause to mention before) and Mary Geddry - both to be found on this platform.
Brown’s post yesterday is notable again for the liveliness of her writing as she steers us through the morass. Check it out:
And while you’re at it try the always excellent Timothy Garton Ash in the Guardian. Blaming both the Democratic establishment and the chicken-shit Washington journalists for the Biden catastrophe that gave us Trump:
Bedtime Reading
Too committed to Andrew O’Hagan’s Caledonian Road to stop now. Up to page 500 and am fully immersed - enjoying the entertaining interplay of his colourful cast in the slough of despond that is modern London.
Musical Interlude
I’ve always been partial to red-heads - figures from my adolescence such as Belinda Lee and Julie London were surely to blame, not to mention one or two femme fatales closer to home. Julie London had a very interesting career: she combined being the ultimate torch singer with a career in Hollywood (notably in Westerns) and a later incarnation in a successful soap opera. Go Slow is an extreme example of her breathy and alluring style. The beautiful voice and the minimal backing. Adults only please.
Sporting Highlights
Nothing notable. The Lions fell at the last fence in Sydney but won the overall series. They were not helped by the torrential rain and the ferociously combative Aussies - with human wrecking-ball Will Skelton running amok. Let’s face it an anti-climax.
That there is no such thing as a certainty in horse-racing was illustrated in the Group 1 Sussex Stakes at Goodwood. The much touted and odds-on (1/3) Field of Gold trailed in 4th - well behind Qirat, a 150-1 shot. This nag was a handicapper that never ran in a group race before and was intended as a pace maker for the favourite in the same ownership. The front-running enterprise of his jockey Richard Kingscote played a major part. The favourite ran a stinker but the rest of the field (all superior on form) got caught out . A form follower like myself was deeply confounded - not because of financial loss (I never bet odds on), but because of the outrageous impossibility of what happened.
Artist’s Archive
I was reminded recently of my old acquaintance Charlie Brady when reading David Britton’s always illuminating 20th Century Irish Art postings on Facebook. I first met Brady in the 1970s when my wife (the artist Diana Kingston) was showing at the old Tom Caldwell Gallery on Fitzwilliam Street. Brady’s wife Eelagh managed the gallery so we became friends with both of them - or more accurately, Diana became friends with Eelagh and I became friends with Charlie. We rarely met as two couples apart from occasional dinners in Charlie’s favourite restaurant, a small Italian place near St. Michael’s Hospital in Dun Laoghaire. Charlie and myself would meet regularly at two pubs, Doheny & Nesbitt’s before art events at the RHA, or one of the nearby galleries; or Grogan’s in the late afternoon on many weekdays. Charlie, notwithstanding his status as a made man on the art scene (showing with Tom Caldwell and later at Taylor Galleries), always had a piece for sale - hanging in Grogan’s amidst the flotsam and jetsam of the other paintings that were a feature of that once bohemian paradise of poets, painters, left-wing politicians and non-specific eccentrics. I remember on my first visit encountering the lanky poet John Jordan unconscious and stretched out full-length on the raised ledge of the urinals. The Dice Man was another regular as was the then hot young writer Des Hogan shuffling his deck of hand-written notes on a stool by the bar. Charlie was a born raconteur and he dominated any group with endless stream of anecdotes about his time amongst the Abstract Expressionists in New York - especially Pollock and De Kooning (or Bill as Charlie called him with easy familiarity). At a certain point in the early evening in Grogan’s he would inform me that it was time for his lift home to Dun Laoghaire (“we’re going home Sullivan”). His house was on my way. He grew unsteady on his pins in later life, and I remember on more that one occasion he would link my arm on the walk from Nesbitt’s over to the RHA’s annual show. He had his characteristic dirty-white, Columbo-style mac while I sported a full-length, black, tramp-style coat back then. The two of us would slowly cross Baggot Steet like two problematic characters from Beckett. Things ended rather tragically for Charlie. While never poor, his income was modest (I doubt he ever sold a painting for more than 1,000 pounds). Near the end of his life, Charlie received a large inheritance ($8000,000) from an aunt in the USA. Very shortly afterwards, the life-long smoker was given a terminal diagnosis for untreated lung cancer. He lasted a few more months but became uncharacteristically morose at the cruelty of his fate. The last time I met him he was sitting at the bar in Grogan’s with a sober-suited medical professional of his acquaintance. I went up to greet him in a jovial manner but was rebuffed with a “go home to your wife Sullivan”. A course of action Charlie had ignored most of his life. I treasure a painting (see below) Charlie gave me as a present a few years earlier. Charlie’s art mainly involved mundane, small objects (mostly white) painted against a dun-coloured background. One day he asked me for one of my baby daughter’s white bootees. A few weeks later he presented me with this painting as a gift. A nice memory of a much-loved great character.
Poet’s Corner
John Berryman was a poète maudit if ever there was one. Hard-core alcoholism, severe depression, joyless womanising and that spectacular suicide - jumping from the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis while slashing his neck at the same time. This was no cry from help - he was determined to get out of here. He even wrote a macabre poem describing the act before he committed it. Here’s an earlier intimation:
Dream Song 172
Your face broods from my table, Suicide.
Your force came on like a torrent toward the end
of agony and wrath.
You were christened in the beginning Sylvia Plath
and changed that name for Mrs Hughes and bred
and went on round the bend
till the oven seemed the proper place for you.
I brood upon your face, the geography of grief,
hooded, till I allow
again your resignation from us now
though the screams of orphaned children fix me anew.
Your torment here was brief,
long falls your exit all repeatingly,
a poor exemplum, one more suicide,
to stack upon the others
till stricken Henry with his sisters & brothers
suddenly gone pauses to wonder why he
alone breasts the wronging tide.