The Forge
The Forge
The painting is based on photographs taken in 2014 with the help of Barney Devlin the forge owner and curator. The poem is only fourteen lines long and recalls Heaney’s journeys as a child as he passed the forge; on the other side of the road.
Heaney homes in on the anvil;
“The anvil must be somewhere in the centre,
Horned as a unicorn, at one end and square,
Set there immoveable: an altar”
The two anvils in the forge are actually quite small and compact so some licence has been taken in the painting, aiming closer to Heaney’s imaginings. You can speculate about the metaphor of looking into the dark and you will have to imagine the “fantail of sparks” inside.
Dark and light provided an opportunity to do a study in black and white.
The title of the poem is “The Forge” and its first line provides the title of Seamus Heaney’s second collection of poetry; Door Into the Dark published by Faber & Faber 1969.