This is the next in my series Famine, depicting the Irish potato blight and the unprecedented results, which impacted an entire country while the rest of the world ignored the plight of a starving people. There are also a series of poems which accompany each painting, to be posted in the near future. Paintings and poems will eventually be organized as an historical continuum.
This piece chronicles the fate of so many emigrants who trusted in the veracity of ships' captains to take them from the shores of a dying country to the expected salvation to be found in America.
So many people died at sea from disease and hunger. The unscrupulous captains who failed to provide the conditions on board that were paid for and promised had their ships dubbed "coffin ships".
In this painting, skeletal and anatomical forms float about beneath a stormy sea toward a final resting place...the tiny boat in a vortex of darkness, wind and rain is symbolic of the immensity of the undertaking the fleeing Irish people were willing to face in hope of a better life.
The completed series and poetry will form a large part of a one- person show scheduled for June 2012 in the Gallery of St. Francis by The Sea, Pine Knoll Shores, North Carolina.
Departure (Famine
Series)
Stand in queue
dockside
you shabby sorrowful
refugees
from the blighted bone-dark hills
you leave behind.
Fetid fields exchanged in no good barter
for bilge-black cargo cave.
Death wears the Captain’s face
and comes for some before land
as a short plank slide to lightless depths,
rendering unheard
prayers for a promised land.
Green is but a fading memory.
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