The artist John McConnell grew up in Belfast and spent 31 years in Canada working in art education. Since 1989 he has been a full-time artist. In 1997, he and his wife, Geraldine, returned to live in Ireland and bought a cottage on the Beara Peninsula.
In Canada, he saw a photograph of the peninsula given to his late father in 1959. It contained a distant view of the cottage which he had recently purchased. The photograph, it transpired, was taken out of storage by his mother after all those years and hung on the wall of his brother's house, where he noticed it at a family gathering.
And there was another twist to the tale.
McConnell has been deeply influenced by the poetry of Seamus Heaney and the paintings of the late Harold Town, the Canadian artist whose advice was not to have a clear image of a finished picture before you started painting.
In keeping with Town's dictum, he was sitting one day in front of a blank canvas. Images came to him and he wound up painting an abstract picture with the ribbed remains of a boat lying on its side. The boat, in much better condition, was featured too in the photograph on the wall in Canada but no significance was ascribed to it at the time.
When he began to wonder about the impulse that prompted the painting, he discovered that the boat shell is still lying at the edge of the sea not far from his Beara cottage.
John McConnell's paintings will be on view at the Frank Lewis Gallery in Killarney until April 3rd next. The exhibition is open to the public from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. from Monday to Saturday.