Many mediums to Marianne’s miraculous story
Artist Marianne Heemskerk at work in her Foxford studio.
Prize-winning Foxford-based painter and printmaker Marianne Heemskerk has a stunning retrospective of her work on display in Ballina’s Civic Offices this month: the visual story of one artist’s life, told in many mediums.
Curated by Ian Wieczorek and presented by Ballina Arts Centre, it starts with a striking self-portrait, a monoprint from 1964, and continues through bold linocuts, lithographs and collographs, all the way to gorgeous oil paintings and coloured etchings of the north Mayo landscapes and seascapes.
At 80-years old, Marianne walks every day, swims, does aquarobics. And she bicycles, of course – she was born and reared in the Netherlands. “I have cycled my whole life – I was born on a bike.” It was her grandfather’s bike that she learned on, graduating from sitting on the luggage carrier to the saddle. “Everyone in Amsterdam was on a bike. There were trams, but no cars.”
Her grandparents raised her. Her mother had TB when she was born, and had to go to a sanitorium in the south for years; her two-year-old brother also had TB, and was sent to a different sanatorium, all by himself.
Her father was a student, but his studies had ended because he refused to sign an oath of loyalty to the occupying German regime. He detested the Nazis; he had sheltered a friend of his, a Jewish poet, but the poet had been picked up when making a secret visit to see his parents, and died in Auschwitz.
Marianne, as a two-week-old baby weighing four pounds, was handed over to her paternal grandmother to mind. It was a struggle for the grandmother to keep the baby alive. The Netherlands was under occupation, and only one tiny jug of milk a day could be bought for newborns.
“My father bought a bag of grain on the black market and my grandmother ground it in a neighbour’s coffee grinder, to make porridge. That kept me alive for a few more months.”
Then came October of 1944, when the German regime blocked everything – “they took all the food, turned off the gas and electricity, no coal, no heating. They took everything. If you were on the street with your bicycle, they would take your bike.” Without heat and food, people died of cold and starvation, “especially the children and the women. My grandparents also were starving. I don’t know how they kept me alive, but they did.”
In May 1945, after eight months, the blockade finally ended. Marianne had survived. The Netherlands and its people recovered slowly from the occupation. Marianne’s immediate family was splintered and traumatised and proved impossible to recreate, so through the rest of her childhood and teenage years she remained with her grandparents.
At 17, she went to art school in Amsterdam; many of her teachers had studied at the Bauhaus and had escaped Nazi Germany just in time. But in her second year, her grandmother died and she felt she had to move on. “I felt such loss,” she says.
She took a job as an au pair in Dublin, while in the evening taking classes in life drawing and sculpture at the College of Art. She joined the Graphic Studio in 1964, where she did lithography and etching. In 1965 and 1966, she exhibited with Group 65, along with Colm O’Briain, John Behan – who opened her show last Saturday – Michael Kane and John Kelly, and in 1967 she was a founder member of the Project Art Gallery on Lower Abbey Street.
It was an amazing immersion in the Dublin art scene for such a young woman, but Marianne was focused on moving forward. “I was grieving, but I was concentrating on surviving. It took another artist” – she doesn’t name him – “to point out ‘you’re grieving, Marianne. Give yourself time’. The memory of that time “still makes me cry. I felt so at home with all these wonderful artists, who just sort of said, ‘come and join us’. I felt so welcome. Such a different atmosphere from the college in Amsterdam, where there was such an atmosphere of competition. In Dublin, it was open, a big family, and suddenly you’re part of it. I think that’s what ‘got me’ about Ireland,” she says.
She married an English artist in Dublin, and had a baby. She had her first exhibition, won a prize from the Young Irish Artists’ Foundation and illustrated book covers for Allen Figgis (of Hodges Figgis) including for Eavan Boland’s first collection of poetry. It was very much one creative family, “a new generation of artists, all surviving on nothing and kicking against the establishment”.
And then there were visits to the West, and the ocean. “The first time I saw the Atlantic, I was blown away – those colours – the blue-green waves – the power of it.”
In 1968, her husband got a place at the film school in Amsterdam, and she returned with him and her son to the Netherlands. “I was so homesick for Ireland, I went back every year, twice a year.” In Amsterdam, the painting was put on hold; she supported her family by working as an English translator for medical journals, until she and her husband split up and she applied for a scheme for artists which guaranteed a number of sales each year – enough to keep body and soul together.
At this point she was living with her son, Niall, “in a tiny place, no bathroom, though there was a bathhouse at the end of the road.” There was an artist on the same street and she ended up sharing their studio, which was an old shop; the other artist had “an etching press, and a dark room, and I loved it, I would spend a whole night in the dark room, printing black and white photos”.
All the time, she had it in her head that she wanted to return to Ireland, permanently. In 1976, she visited Inishbofin for the first time – one of her artist friends had done a sculpture for the hotel – and she has been going there ever since. “It’s my kind of place. I go there to feel away from everything.”
The following year she was back in Inishbofin again for the arts festival, and she won’t ever forget being brought over with a bunch of other artists in a “in a little wooden boat, in a horrendous storm, sitting on the deck because the hold was full of Guinness, the waves towering above her heads, everyone holding hands in terror…” And as they turned into the harbour, “the skipper said, ‘this is the most dangerous bit’. I’ll never forget him saying that.”
Fortunately, Marianne the survivor, survived again.
Despite returning so often, it wasn’t until 1997 that she felt ready to move back for good. Some other artist friends had settled in Foxford, and they told her, “come to Mayo, come to Foxford” and let her stay in their little caravan for the summer.
She found a place to live, and stayed. The landscape held her. “Nature is much more in your face here. The light in North Mayo is so special, the colours have a different quality, the light is so bright when the sun is out, it’s just very direct. Maybe it’s the reflection from the sea.”
Up until then she had been largely an autobiographical artist, but now she moved to landscape. Fields, islands, cliffs, the sea. Working from her studio in Foxford, Marianne captures in paint and print, line and colour, the everchanging weather, birds blown in on the beach, the secret life of hares.
The cycle of the seasons; the great circle of survival.
