Michael Moynihan: Sketches of old Cork draw you a snapshot of a different city

Anyway. i see The Gallery Press has re-issued Cork, a book of poems by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin with drawings by artist Brian Lalor.

My eye was drawn to Lalor’s beautiful line drawings not so much because of my artistic instincts — easily summarised as ‘I know what I like and I like what I know’ — but because of what they represent.

The book was originally published in 1977, and Lalor’s drawings are a snapshot of a different city: a smaller, shabbier one maybe, but also a friendly and inquisitive one. When I spoke to him he sketched (sorry) the background to the book.

In the mid-seventies he had been working in Israel as an archeologist for a number of years on a major site, and when that work came to a conclusion he hadn't been in Ireland for at least ten years.

“That work was done, my mother was getting older. I had good reasons for returning, which I did with no particular plan in mind.”

At that point his brother lived at the top of the building which housed McCarthy’s bakery in Daunt’s Square. Lalor was looking out over Cork from the windows there and started drawing.

“The simple geography of the city was the engine that kept me going, and once I had begun I realised it was really very interesting topic.

“Cork was much smaller than I’d thought. It ended, really, at the top of Barrack Street and at the top of Shandon Street and MacCurtain Street.

“I walked the entire city over a period of a year, and the drawings were what I produced. I then looked for a collaborator.”

He asked the “most Cork of the writers available” to work with him: Patrick Galvin.

“We met a couple of times, and he said yes, delighted. And he said yes, delighted again. And he said yes, delighted, the tenth time, so . . .

“I scanned the horizon. Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin had been at UCC with my brother, and when I asked her, she said yes. Then Peter Fallon of The Gallery Press, who published Eiléan, said he was interested in publishing the book.”

Hence the drawings. They’re streetscapes and quaysides, alleys and nooks and crannies. There aren’t too many great houses visible, which was a deliberate move.

“I wasn’t interested in drawing the ‘best’ of architecture. St Fin Barre’s Cathedral may get in there somehow in the background, but if it does it’s very much in the background. I was trying to capture the texture and the people in the streets.

“I had spent four years working intensely on destroyed cities from 2,000 years ago, so I was very interested in ruins. Cork had something of that at the time, it was shabby.

“But it was more than just something with character. It was also something that represented the life of the past, which was much more accessible.

“There was obviously prosperity, and I would say Cork was on the up in terms of the suburbs. Those had reached out, the city was growing all the time, so that prosperity was there, but it wasn't what I was interested in.”

And the drawings themselves? How were they done?

“I remember that very clearly, and the curiosity of the people in the street as to what I was doing.

“I heard ‘what are you up to?’ quite a lot but people were always very friendly. I had drawn around the Middle East, and that was much more hostile; it was as if you were representing the government or indicating that taxes were going to go up, so there was considerable suspicion of your activities. I never encountered that in Cork, the thought that I might be up to no good.

“I was never harassed or anything. It did attract attention from people but they were interested in a very genuine way. They wanted to tell me stuff — ‘Did you know Jimmy Riley who lived there? Do you know what happened to the woman who lived there?'

“I didn't use a camera. I drew from life. It gives a different effect. I drew on the spot with a sketchpad in pencil, and I would do some work on it at home, then I would come out again and I'd look at it.

“The drawings are in black and white, line drawings. That was a very conscious decision.

“My favourite part? Walking around, just in terms of atmosphere, the North and South Main Street and the alleyways leading off those.

“The main street of today is the main street of the medieval city, it's just wider now. And the alleyways were the side streets. That structure was all there.

“That's where the archaeologist comes out, that the skeleton of the earliest city is still there, and that much is intact, and that's fascinating.”

The drawings’ black and white focus foreshadows a great deal of Lawlor’s later career, which features in a major retrospective running at the West Cork Arts Centre until October 12.

As for the book itself, after two printings it disappeared from bookshops but when Lalor ran into Elaine last year they felt it was time for a reissue. Peter Fallon agreed, and now the book has returned.

Not before time. The central spine that Lalor loved so much has been shamefully neglected in parts — the stretch of North Main Street joined by Liberty and Castle Streets is one of the national emblems of dereliction and neglect. In any summary of the general decline of our inner cities you’ll find a picture of that intersection, empty and decaying.

Those alleys off North Main Street, the atmospheric passageways that Lalor was so fond of, have suffered as well. The last historic laneway on the same street was recently gated as part of a student apartment development, a move which flared into a brief controversy.

Going in the other direction the story is no better. Walk up South Main Street and there’s an array of abandoned buildings and waste land, plazas cordoned off from the public, and, of course, the empty wilderness where the Cork Event Centre may eventually appear. Or not, depending on your cynicism about possible announcements in the run-up to the coming election.

It’s interesting to look at Lalor’s drawings as a marker of a poorer city, but a place which took more pride in its appearance, for all that. Those curious pedestrians who questioned the artist with the sketchpad fifty years ago would surely have been stunned by the way their city is neglected now.

I finished our chat by asking Lalor if he revisits those old haunts much, given he’s based in west Cork.

“I plan to go with the book under my arm,” he told me. “To look and see what's there now, or is some of it gone.”

*For information on the Brian Lalor retrospective see skibbereenartsfestival.com/festivals/skibbereen-arts-festival-2024/events/brian-lalor-retrospective

Cork is published by The Gallery Press and is in the shops now.