Meeting the artist Melita Denaro leaves your heart blown open, much like a moment Seamus Heaney describes in Postscript, where a "drive out west" will catch the "heart off guard and blow it open". Born in 1950, Denaro was born in Malaysia, before moving to Burt, Co Donegal at the age of four. She lives and works between Donegal and London. Her work is inspired by, and painted in, the same location on the idyllic Isle of Doagh, on the north Atlantic coast of Donegal.
She quotes the Heaney poem when she shows me where she is inspired, and where she paints. One of Ireland’s most prolific painters, you may not have heard of Denaro, but once you see her work, you are forever changed. A vivacious woman, she is at once ebullient and vulnerable, with a palpable understanding of the softer and half lights of life.
She was educated in England and was trained at Central School of Art & Design and the Royal Academy Schools. Her first exhibition at the renowned John Martin Gallery was held in 2002. She has exhibited in New York, Ireland and the UK, is featured in collections all over the world, including the Ulster Museum which is her great pride, and counts Prince Charles and Oprah Winfrey as fans.
She was diagnosed with MS in 1996 and it has progressed with each year, to the point that she is now a wheelchair user and can no longer stand. She retains independence with a team of studio and personal assistants without whom her life and work would not be possible. Denaro would put a desire for a lazy day to shame and lives a full, busy life with friends from all over the world and her beloved dog, Padraigín.
She drives from her wheelchair in an adapted van, which takes her over and back to London on the ferry. Her paintings are her livelihood and without them she would be in full time care, so her art is borne out of passion and necessity. Her unique prism of emotion brings the ordinary into the extraordinary, it makes Donegal about its soil and its sea and its people and its soul.
I visit Denaro's cottage with my godmother Bernie, a fellow artist, and she drives us and Padraigín to the shore. When you see the almighty brace of Donegal seas crashing and rising to kiss the syrupy skies, you understand why her heart is blown open there. Her new exhibition On Home Ground Then opened last week and runs until July 9th in Dublin's Taylor Gallery. The title of the show was inspired by a meeting with the aforementioned Heaney.
“He was giving a talk at a summer school in Ballyliffin. I was introduced to him and, hearing my accent, enquired as to where I was from and when I said Burt, he smiled, acknowledging my Irishness, and said ‘on home ground then’. I was so touched that he saw beyond the accent, drilled into me at my convent school over there by Irish nuns with notions of upperocity, them with their Oxbridge degrees, to my nationality.”
Denaro is an example of never giving up on your dreams. While she was always interested, she didn’t start painting seriously until she was 40, when “by some miracle, I was accepted into the Royal Academy Schools”. She was the oldest ever student to get in.
“The typical day for me now is much like everyone else. Up and out to work, except that I need a bed that sits me up and a hoist that helps me out of bed and a personal assistant to help wash and dress me. Then it’s admin in the morning and straight to the studio or the field if I’m at home.”
“How do I stay positive? I have a huge appetite for life. I love my life. The sad days do come, more anxious than sad, and this throughout the years has been terrible, but I am in a great place now – although when I wake up in the morning I feel like I’ve been hit by a truck because I can hardly move.”
Denaro’s parents originally met at a dance in Derry, where her father was stationed. He was half Maltese and half Italian; her mother was from Derry. But while life would intervene, they finally came together later, when both were in their forties. One of the most formative, painful experiences Denaro went through, which shaped the journey of her life, was the death of her beloved father. “His death in 1968 and the leaving of Ireland has coloured my whole life. I was broken by it, by his loss.”
Her art is not therapy, it is her life force. “I suppose I pour all my longing into my work. It’s really difficult to talk about it, I suppose to me it’s just like breathing. If I stop I can’t breathe.”
Denaro’s paintings are a wonderful and humbling reminder of how to live.
On Home Ground Then runs until July 9th at the Taylor Gallery, Kildare Street, Dublin 2; taylorgalleries.ie
