Farm with view of Achill Island
WALKING TALKING
On the road in Ireland’s wild west
Watercolors: Helga Kaffke
Writings: Gabriele Berthel
Translation or rough translation from German by Ute Daly
ISBN 978-3-95655-898-6 (E-Book)
ISBN 978-3-95655-897-9 (Book)
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Once, when asked about her artistic concepts, Helga Kaffke said: “...to paint a landscape like a portrait and a portrait like a landscape.”
The relentless blue of southern skies never tempted this painter abroad. She worked in the reserved expanses of the European north, in later years more and more in the loneliness of the west of Ireland. She loved its invincible light, whose source remains in darkness, when the storm tears slate-grey clouds into shreds in an overcast February sky. Beneath it, in scrubby bog grass, pink and blue sheep are blossoming. The gleaming bogwater reflects serenely a painter, who even in memory never claimed indifference. In those on-paper resurrected landscapes we find it all: bog grass and moss, rock and fern, sheep pink and blue. And people? Those too, but mostly their traces: in the skilfully woven complexity of electric lines, in cottages not just dreaming of sea views (location, location, location)...
Melancholic vitality and vital melancholy – sometimes the boundaries blur.
This is the ambivalence in these works of art – you can never be certain if what you see is truly there or if you intuit that which is neither hidden nor obvious on the surface. Beings, for example, who have become so much an integral part of the landscape that they can only appear as part of it, impossible to substract from it without dissolving it in its entirety.
This is a way to create a riddle from a solution. Find and you will seek. And while we, the observers, look at such a painting, relays are closing in our brain, connections are made, in subtle ways, we can trace: in ourselves. This is a consequence.
The painter who portrays a landscape in this way can remain serene, when a mainstream trendsetter lectures her about the rules of the art market.
Gabriele Berthel
The white-washed walls have been devoured by salt:
the last protection. The stones lie bare.
And on the walls that are still standing green moss is growing –
Thus, soon forgotten under the wind,
the leftovers of a life look, deserted:
six steps in a square, and nearly brightened
by the rag of the sky falling into the small room.
That tries to expand, to seize so much light...
and so much air, enough not to get smothered –
Beautifully reflected by the sea, by strange eyes,
the cottage wakes up dreamless from dreaming
Of elated cameras, romantic advertisements...
Where the blind window crosses itself,
the frame projects a shadow.
Finally there is nothing left of the house, only a glow
of gorse bloom through empty windows
and the shadows of scrawny crows on the gable
And abandoned voices remain in the house
voices that won't move out
prevent it's release, entrench themselves in the roofless house
in their dotage
Plainly the house has nothing to offer
but its vast openness, its open end.
The house hasn't even got an auctioneer
to grant it a last word of praise,
to wait for a last bit —
It has long ceased to be an object
of desire
of gesticulation
the house that cannot perish
and can't be resurrected
The gorse stands still. And the house stands still. And for the space
of seconds a scrowny crow sits still
on the sun-kissed open gable.
Thus life continues here
at a standstill
and on the road time travels by
redeeming all, carrying everything along,
everything except the abandoned voices
that stubbornly refuse to climb on board,
leave the world, enter into eternal peace...
Stoically the gorse blooms under the open gable
through empty windows of half-razed walls
that stand out sharply against the light like scrawny crows
