Exploring surreal landscapes

An ancient oak wood that hugs the Lough Ramor shore at the end of the boreen known as ‘The Boat Road’ is a recurring motif in the work of Jean Antoine-Dunne.

Jean’s home is as close as you can get to the lake while keeping your feet dry, and even on this most miserable of days, Virginia town is clearly visible on the opposite shore. Jean fondly recalls how her late husband Séamus Dunne would take the boat in the morning to go to work as a guidance teacher in the local vocational school. The pair had met when Séamus was teaching maths in Trinidad. In the late 1970s they returned to Séamus’s home town of Dublin before swiftly relocating to this fine old gatehouse in lesser-spotted Cavan.

One room of her Munterconnaught home is currently the storeroom for her epic canvases that make up her forthcoming exhibition: ‘In scapes / Ex scapes / Landscapes’ that opens in the Ramor Arts centre in the coming weeks.

The huge scale of the work demands to be noticed, while the warm colours echo Jean’s outgoing personality. Working fast, she starts off with recognisable forms before letting go allow a more surreal style take hold.

“I tend to work out my emotions in paint,” Jean confesses.

“The first paintings I do in a series, you can say, ‘That’s a tree’, but by the time I’m finished with it, it’s no longer a tree – it’s me.”

She elaborates that how she feels emerges from studying the tree and reflects what her life “means at that time”.

The work the Celt most admires is of the nearby woods.

“These are the spirits who reside in the woods,” she says of the huge work.

Do you feel spirits in the woods?

“Of course I do,” she responds before the question has fully left the Celt’s lips. “I think most people do, don’t they? When you walk in a space like that, it’s such an old space.”

She elaborates: “When I say spirits I don’t mean dead people, I mean the woods have presence. You can feel the presence coming out of the land, especially if you walk early in the morning, and the light in the early morning is extraordinary.”

A literary academic, Jean has authored five books. Her work is interested in the impact of film on literature, focusing on writer Samuel Beckett, poet Derek Walcott and film innovator Sergei Eisenstein.

“He was the greatest film-maker of all time,” she lauds, explaining how his ideas on montage greatly impacted her work.

“I’m a bit of a fanatic about montage,” she says. “Different fragments come together to create one unified idea, so it’s through their juxtaposition you create a visual impact – the impact is intensified through juxtaposition.”

A work called ‘Ancestors’ is one for which she has received glowing feedback. Radiant with harmonious colours, it would brighten the day.

“This is about Caribbean belief, this is about the question of generations – this is a poui tree, an extraordinarily beautiful tree. The poui tree represents the idea of growth in generation.”

The richness of Jean’s ethnicity is remarkable, with roots extending to such diverse regions as France, China, Africa, Portuguese, and of course the Caribbean.

“The story in my family is, that my mother’s aunt was one of the greatest seer women in the Caribbean, she was what was called an Obeah woman. All of the politicians throughout the Caribbean used to go to her for advice. We have been led to believe that this idea of spiritual power is something that is passed down through the generations,” Jean says.

And now that power can be traced in her paintings.