After four years as director at the artists' retreat in Annaghmakerrig, Pat Donlon is about to move on. But she is leaving
more than one parting gift behind her, writes ARMINTA WALLACE

AT FIRST GLANCE it looks like any big-house library. There’s a glass-fronted cabinet full of leather-bound books. There are comfy and not-so-comfy chairs and graceful bow windows which overlook a lawn on one side and Annaghmakerrig Lake on the other.

The paintings, however, give the game away. An eclectic selection of sizes, shapes and styles, they’re all resolutely contemporary. This is because the library is part of the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, near Newbliss in Co Monaghan, birthplace of countless works of art – poetry, novels, paintings, music, and more besides – since it opened its doors as an artists’ retreat in October 1981.

There have been just three directors at Annaghmakerrig: Bernard Loughlin, Sheila Pratschke and Pat Donlon. The latter has recently announced her intention to retire at the close of 2010, a year before the end of her five-year contract. As we settle at a table and gaze at the array of autumnal trees outside the window, she explains that she has had a run of health challenges, including a broken foot and a small stroke. Her doctor reckons it would be good for her health if she took things a bit easier.

It hasn’t been an easy decision, she says, but having taken it she’s determined to leave things in good order for her successor. “When you’re here day to day you don’t know what you’re doing really,” she says. “So I’ve been doing quite a bit of soul-searching in recent weeks, asking myself: ‘What did I actually achieve over the past four years?’”

Quite a bit, is the answer. She added three extra studios for visual artists and installed full-spectrum lighting so that lack of daylight would no longer be an issue. She began the digital diary known as Artlog, by means of which artists can document the process of creating their work, which is now online. She welcomed the donation of an upright piano from Phil Coulter, as well as a grand piano on long-term loan from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.

But most important to her, she says, has been the improvement in creature comforts, “silly things like replacing mattresses and pillows and curtains; putting reading lamps on every single desk in the house; putting an Oxford dictionary on every single desk in the house; trying to get better internet services in the main building. Broadband came to Newbliss in September and I practically had a party.”

Donlon also revamped the catering arrangements so that cooked meals are provided at weekends instead of artists having to forage in the kitchen for themselves. The food at Annaghmakerrig has become something of a legend, partly thanks to Donlon hiring the organic gardener Geraldine Sheerin.

“Fresh vegetables are brought in every day and a great big pot of soup is made from that,” Donlon says proudly. “Almost everything you will eat for lunch is grown here. I like to think I’ve had the vision for the big stuff, too. But I still think that a lot of it boils down to the small stuff. If artists are going to continue to come to Annaghmakerrig they need to be treated with respect.

“Here, they aren’t strange people in the community. They’re all artists. They’re all respected. This is their job, their work. When they come here, they don’t have to worry about picking up the kids from school or what they’re going to cook or when they’re going to shop. They just do their work.”

No starving or freezing in garrets for the lucky artists who come to Annaghmakerrig then? Definitely not, Donlon retorts. There’s quite enough of that in the big bad world outside. “I see a lot of artists struggling financially,” she says. “Many of them have to have other jobs. Very, very few can do it full-time. The difficulty then is that people treat their art as their hobby – and it’s not their hobby, it’s their life, but they can’t live by it. That’s something I’ve certainly become more aware of since I’ve been here. The sheer hard graft of it.”

Donlon’s philosophy of creativity is based on a holistic approach. She likes to quote the Indian-born writer Rumer Godden who, following an Indian proverb, maintained that everyone is a house with four rooms: physical, mental, emotional and spiritual. “Most of us tend to live in one room most of the time, and that’s fine,” says Donlon. “But unless we go into every room every day, if only to keep it aired, we are not a complete person. That’s what people get here.”

The landscape – the lake, the walks, what Donlon calls “the nurturing little hills of Monaghan” – takes care of the spirit. As for the emotions, the centre offers a strongly stabilising sense of home, thanks not least to the local people who work there, whose humour and good sense are deeply impressive to visitors. “I’d say it’s a home from home, except that many homes were never like that,” Donlon observes wryly.

The intellectual component comes from the artists themselves. It’s the elusive spark that brings art into being and that can’t, Donlon insists, be engineered or manipulated. “You just put everything you can in place, and then you have to leave it. You can’t make it happen.”

Guthrie’s prescient insistence that visiting artists should come together for a meal in the evenings, however, seems to have played a major role over the years.

“The chat around the table in the evenings is amazing, and that’s where you get the most astonishing collaborations going on,” she says.

“I remember the composer John Kinsella saying that he had to introduce one of his pieces in the concert hall, and he was fretting about it when he was here. He really wasn’t sure how to approach it. And he said to me that – and I wish I could remember the name of the artist who was sitting beside him at dinner – but she actually gave him the solution. She was saying something about her own work and she spoke from a visual artist’s point of view, and whatever the exchange was, it freed him up to do this task. It gave him a way forward.”

Sometimes the visiting artists are quiet souls. Other times, there’ll be impromptu readings or open studios or musical sessions. Somebody might give yoga classes or do t’ai chi on the lawn at dawn or, if they’re brave enough, go skinny-dipping in the lake. Playfulness, too, is part of the creative process.

“The first year I was here it was a good summer, the only one we’ve had in four years,” Donlon says. “Just outside my house was a sunny spot in the evenings, and I’d sit out there. And individual artists would pass by and some of them would sit down and we’d have a drink and, before you knew where you were, a little party would have started.”

We gaze out of the window, where two people are examining the leaf-strewn ground with apparent fascination.

“I know what they’re looking at,” Donlon declares, delighted. “Every director who comes here has tried to make the centre a better place than when they started. That would have been my ambition as well. But I also wanted to leave a more tangible gift, and it’s going to be an orchard.”

She is in negotiation with the Irish Seed Savers Association to get native apple trees, some of which are rare, almost specialist, species. “That will be my parting gift,” she says. “Because once I go, I’ll go. I have this theory that you never go back. It’s not fair to your successor to be hanging around. But it will be nice for me, too, to think of the trees growing here, and the blossom in the spring. So, you know, seeds have been sown. I once got a card from somebody which said: ‘Ideas grow. Plant one every day.’

“They do grow. And this is the place for them.”