Artist Ger captures a year in the life of Prom

Lifestyle –  Bernie Ní Fhlatharta talks to Geraldine Folan about her mammoth achievement of chronicling a year in Salthill on canvas

Anyone who walked Salthill Prom over the past year may have noticed a woman working on a canvas perched on an easel. Anyone who bothered to ask was told what she was doing. There is no doubt that some regular walkers who saw her on and off in the past year might have thought she was taking her time!

Geraldine Folan was actually capturing A Year on the Prom on canvas and the fruits of that work can be seen in her new exhibition of the same name when it opens on September 15 at the Connacht Tribune Printworks.

After a lifetime of painting, rearing a family and giving private art classes, the project proved hugely enjoyable for Geraldine, if a little daunting at first.

It is apt that Geraldine undertook this project – having been born and reared in Salthill (a Kelleher from Rockbarton Road). “I was wheeled up and down the Prom in a pram by my mum and auntie.

“I thought I knew the Prom but not as much as I do now,” she laughs adding that she hopes her paintings will bring more awareness of it to others.

“It’s not just walking along the Prom itself, it’s what you see all around you, from out on the ocean to the buildings to the wildflowers to the rocks.”

She started in August of last year and decided to capture the Prom in all sorts of weather and light during the course of the year. She also committed to blogging about it – so if she failed, it would be a spectacularly public failure.

But there was little chance of a failure as long as Geraldine could put one foot in front of the other. The mother of six and a grandmother to two toddlers, is fiesty, hardy and determined.

She is also passionate about Galway, especially her native Salthill and wanted to share it. She has done this spectacularly in thirty canvasses, three of them a large triptych.

The hardest part of the project was “battling the weather” and though she wanted to capture Salthill Prom in all sorts of weather, the wind was her biggest obstacle.

She laughs now remembering trying to put up an easel and having to tie the canvas to her wrist. She makes a sketch first and then roughly outlines her scene in acrylics using a palette knife as they dry quickly. Sometimes she had to use a water sprayer. She also took photographs, lots of them.

“The buildings and rocks never change so I could always put them in later but I needed to capture the mood there and then on canvas, like the sky or the sea,” she explains earnestly.

Geraldine finished all her works in her studio at her home in Barna in oils.

At the time of our interview, she was still putting the finishing touches to a few canvasses in her studio before they headed off to the framers.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.