Oil on Canvas, 80 X 60 cm
Tír fo Thuinn speaks as Gaeilge of the Land Under the Wave.
From the lore of the Irish mythological cycle, it is the realm of the Otherworld better known to many Irish people as Tir na nOg,The land of Eternal Youth.
A place of great beauty glittering in eternal sunshine The Tír fo Thuinn had four magical cities named Falias, Gorias, Finias and Murias and was said to be located off the coast of Ireland somewhere in the Western Sea.Rather than a place of the afterlife, Tír fo Thuinn is earthly place that could be reached through magic and the incubation of the self through meditation and immersions. It is the home of the Fae and the place of the hero’s quest for self-realisation.
The path across the sea to reach this mystical land was named Mag Mell – The Plain of Honey and it was revealed to the traveller where sun danced across the surface of the sea, illuminating the way.
The Sea, its liquid life and unfathomable depths, is the symbolic realm of the unconscious. The otherworldly voyage to Tír fo Thuinn - The Land under the Wave is the journey of our individual consciousness back to our origin, the vast primal womb of life and ecstatic place of wholeness.
This painting is composed in the light of this myth but it doesn’t illustrate the idea instead it plays along the surface of the idea a bit like the sun dancing across surface of the sea.